instead were reminiscent of professional letter formats, with formal greetings and politeness formulas. They did not find significant use of abbreviated forms or emoticons in either of the two types of email. These stylistic differences suggest that, despite the presence of certain features typical of technology-mediated communication, emails, like other examples of digital interactions, ‘reflect the social realities of their users’ (Herring et. Al. 2013: 11). Therefore, these studies show that there are actually very notable differences between interactive practices on the Internet. As argued by Ngwenyama & Lee (1997), digital interactions do not simply transmit certain linguistic, structural or textual features, but reflect and produce dynamic discursive practices in which social relations are set in motion and created:

When people communicate, they do not send messages as electronically linked senders and receivers. They perform social acts in action situations that are normatively regulated by, and already have meaning within, the organisational context. As organisational actors, they simultaneously enact existing and new relationships with one another as they communicate. (Ngwenyama & Lee, 1997: 164).

In this corpus, the interactions between guests and hotels show that guests act socially by sharing the account of their stay with an audience, and hotels do not ‘respond’ in the strictly textual sense to user opinions, but act pragmatically and discursively to establish (new) relationships with users/guests, who refer and have an impact on offline practices. Communication on the platform allows interaction with different ‘reception roles’ (Goffman 1981): direct recipients (the travellers who wrote the review) and indirect recipients (those who also wrote reviews but not the specific review to which the hotel was answering) Portolés (2004: 223-226), following Goffman, distinguishes between these direct and indirect listeners, and also speaks of casual or furtive listeners, to whom the message is not addressed but who can listen or read it, a phenomenon mentioned by Albaladejo (2010: 928) in his study on ‘poliacroasis’, which he defines as ‘the plural reception and interpretation of rhetorical discourses’. In this case, the Tripadvisor platform allows for the presence of casual or furtive listeners, who read reviews regularly or sporadically. Hotels, undoubtedly, are aware of these users as potential customers and guests. However, Albadalejo (2010: 930-931) describes how Barack Obama mentioned these casual users in his speeches, although we have not found any reference to those other users in the responses from hotels in our corpus.

When analysing the language standard, Mancera Rueda (2016) studies the uses that stray from the standard and distinguishes two types; those that do not respect spelling norms (spelling errors) and those that are used consciously for purposes of communication and expression (heterography or alternative spelling). This second type aims to introduce innovative features in digital writing, by imitating or adapting oral expression for example, the use of several exclamation or question marks (Mancera Rueda, 2016: 10). The author considers that some uses are already consolidated in digital communication, such as the use of abbreviations (‘xq’ instead of ‘porque’ in Spanish), and are not errors but intentional and much used forms in digital communication. In line with these considerations, and in accordance with the Coserian perspective, the concept of standard has at least two main meanings (among others, since it is a polysemic concept): (i) the prescriptive sense, as what should be said or written and is associated with linguistic correctness, and (ii) the standard in the descriptive sense, as what is usual or habitual (Martin Zorraquino 1988: 431-440). The former implies correctness and refers to the linguistic habits supported in authorised and prestige forms of language and its users, usually in public discursive practices. The latter meaning of standard, on the other hand, refers to what is normal or usual. The two meanings are related in such a way that the latter precedes the former, that is to say, linguistic habits become habitual