Speech Act Set in TripAdvisor Conflictive Exchanges

Abstract

Abstract In the present article, taking a ‘polylogal’ perspective, we carry out a cross-linguistic analysis of speech act sets in conflictive exchanges (SASCs) on TripAdvisor (TA) in Spanish and Italian. These exchanges involve, on one hand, reviewer opinions concerning hospitality and travel experiences and, on the other, hospitality/travel-industry representative responses to form a review-response pair that is part of a polylogue with other TA users. These exchanges are characterised as potentially conflictive since, where travellers rate their experiences as poor, this micro-act of complaint may be responded to in a more or less confrontational fashion with hospitality-industry representatives responding in ways that either encourage, minimise, or avoid conflict. Our research is based on a total of 1,000 TripAdvisor (TA) posts forming two sub-corpora (Spanish and Italian) each of 500 review-response pairs where users gave opinions concerning their experiences of certain hotels or restaurants and were responded to by representatives from these hotels or restaurants. Our objective is to analyse these SASCs in order to identify a) the different categories of SASCs used in, firstly, reviews (opposition) and, secondly, in responses (reactions); b) to what extent each of these categories are used; c) if there is variation between the Spanish and Italian sub-corpora in terms of the use of different types of SASCs in opposition and reaction, and finally, d) how this variation might be related to sociocultural factors in the two sub-corpora. Data show several dissimilarities between the Spanish and Italian sub-corpora in terms of communication strategies used on the TA platform. For example, Italian hotel/restaurant representatives adopted a confrontational style using mostly unmitigated disagreement, acts of disqualification or self-praise while, in contrast, Spanish respondents were more supportive using mostly convivial acts, mitigating supportive moves and linguistic strategies. Besides giving a range of insights into cross-cultural variation in digital communication strategies, this work also provides a methodological model for the analysis of macro conflictive speech acts and their modification strategies. It is hoped that this model will prove useful in future research concerning digital communication, especially TA exchanges.