of production and reception; the channel; the interpersonal or institutional nature of the communicative activity; the participation scheme; the relationships of hierarchy and solidarity existing between participants, –that is, what Halliday (1985) subsumed in the concepts of field, tenor and mode– determine the stylistic characteristics of the different discursive modalities. According to this idea (Halliday, 1985; Gee, 1999; Garrido Medina, 1997: 114-117), style does not simply designate a set of linguistic properties that is superimposed on previous content; style is meaning –transmits it– to the extent that its use reflects the representation that speakers have of the context of the situation, and therefore, of how the statements contained in it should be interpreted. Therefore, the choice of a style is associated with particular contexts of use and the ways in which the speakers of a linguistic community represent themselves –based on socially constructed expectations– and the functioning of the components in these contexts. Registers, as linguistic variations associated with more general properties of interactions, play a fundamental role in shaping style. While some authors make style traits coincide with sociolects, or social variation traits, others emphasise that the same social group may present different styles, which is why style can be considered a contextual category, which relates situational traits with linguistic features (Garrido Medina, 1997: 114). Style is characterised by choice, while social variation may be at least partially determined by the user, and not, or not solely, by use. In terms of variation of uses, style refers to ‘the set of factors that intervene in the communicative situation, and the relationship with the listener is considered fundamental, that is, the aim of the addressee or receiving public, accommodation of one to the other, the interaction in social media, or prestige in the “linguistic marketplace”’(Garrido Medina, 1997: 117). This idea of style is particularly relevant to our corpus because, as will be seen in the analysis, communicative styles reflect different representations on the users’ expectations and intentions regarding audience design.

In technology-mediated communication, the already solid tradition of studies has highlighted the structural characteristics of internet communication (see Herring et. Al., 2013; Yus, 2011), such as interactivity, horizontality or multimodality (Herring et. al., 2013). Some of the features that have been associated with this type of communication are informality and orality (Yus, 2011; Vela Delfa, 2016) and divergence from the linguistic standard (Mancera Rueda, 2016), in line with the emergence of a minimalist and immediate writing, without regulatory filters. However, in recent decades, scholars have observed how discursive practices are continually modified, in line with the rapid evolution of the Internet. A paradigmatic case is email, which was initially described as an informal genre, with characteristics that were associated with orality (Yus, 2011), while more recent studies describe it in professional and academic settings (Pérez Sabater, Turney & Montero, 2008). Clarity, economy and expressiveness stand out as characteristic elements of the communicative style of SMS text messages (Cantamutto, 2017). These three features obviously respond to the contextual factors of this type of text (brevity and speed of response or reaction), and also explain the abundance of abbreviated forms and emoticons. Cantamutto (2017) also highlights informality, a trait that stands out overall in computer-mediated communication (Herring et. al, 2013; Yus, 2011). However, other studies have nuanced the identification of traits that can be applied without taking into account a detailed analysis of participants in interactions. From a corpus of emails in English sent between university professors in academia, Pérez Sabater, Turney and Montero (2008) studied the appearance and frequency of style parameters such as greetings, politeness, the use of emoticons and emojis, abbreviated forms and contractions. The study finds significant variation between emails addressed to a single recipient and collective emails addressed to multiple recipients. While the former exhibited traits of informality and had hardly any politeness markers or elaborate greetings, the collective emails