Monografico_7_EN_Doxa_31_Style_variation

order to limit the study methodology. Therefore, the objective of this study is to observe the interactions between opinions and responses and to study the stylistic features of both. The hypothesis is that the communicative style of the users of the platform is not homogeneous, but shows variation and even open divergence, in line with the communicative purposes of guests and hotels and the relationship they establish offline. An important element of the corpus is the relationship between the stylistic features of guests and hotels with the notions and perceptions of linguistic standard, which can lead to discussion on how to consider this type of digital writing in relation to the concept of the language standard.

This article is structured by firstly reviewing the bibliography on the subject. In section 3, we discuss some aspects related to the notion of style and registers and the parameters with which they can be studied. In section 4, we introduce the data and methodology. In sections 5 and 6, we present the results and discussion of the analysis of the different stylistic parameters chosen by the guests writing the reviews and the hotels’ responses from a comparative approach.

2. Online consumer reviews

Online consumer reviews are an emerging trend that evolved from brief comments offered by users after purchasing products online and which have spread to numerous areas of commerce, creating a discourse genre in which the consumer transmits information and opinion on products (Chen & Xie, 2008). Vasquez (2011, 2014) describes reviewers as ‘prosumers’, a term that refers to consumers who are also producers, usually unpaid, of online content.

Consumer reviews have received attention in different fields, mainly in marketing and advertising, where studying user opinions is widespread and useful in designing advertising strategies (Brigs, Sutherland & Sioban, 2007; Sparks & Browning, 2010 ). These studies suggest that users read opinions carefully and are more inclined to value more those products that feature opinions from other users (Munar & Jens, 2014; Miguéns, Baggio & Costa, 2008). Linguistic orientation studies have paid particular attention to the analysis of negative reviews and complaints, mainly in English (Vasquez, 2011, 2014, Zhang & Vasquez, 2014). In Spanish, Mancera Rueda (2018) studied mitigation strategies on Tripadvisor based on a corpus of reviews of hotels and restaurants in different places, while Hernández Toribio and Mariottini (2015) described the speech acts that appear in the opinions of users, and also delved into the construction of the narration of travellers’ experiences on Tripadvisor (Mariottini and Hernández Toribio, 2017). In addition, there has been a joint analysis of negative and positive opinions with a comparative pragmatic approach and the question of interculturality in the experiences of travellers in the Hispanic world (Márquez-Reiter and Hidalgo Downing, 2020).

To describe some general characteristics of consumer reviews, Virtanen (2017: 81) uses the notion of adaptability as set out by Verschueren:

‘The property of language which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs’ (Verschueren, 1999: 61).