Speech acts and mitigation 2.0: TripAdvisor

Abstract

This paper, which is in the line of the pragmatic studies of digital tourism, is focused on the analysis of some mitigation strategies, in particular, the expressive acts of praise, thanks and apologies as supportive moves of the main speech acts. To this aim, we have analyzed a corpus of 200 travellers’ opinions about hotels, divided in “excellent”, “very good”, “average”, “poor”, and “terrible” because, as we have shown in a previous work (Hernández Toribio & Mariottini 2016), this rating affects politeness, determining the selection and the degree of mitigation strategies. The results show that in TripAdvisor exchanges, contrary to everyday interactions, praise, thanks and apologies are acts with a higher degree of ritualization, whose non-compliance can damage speakers’ faces. This kind of normative politeness is imposed, among other factors, by the discursive genre, which, in travellers’ opinions as well as in the replies of the hotel representatives, plays a strategic role (Albelda Marco & Barros García 2013). This happens when criticisms or complaints and disagreement with the critics, respectively, are produced.