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Credibility is a function associated with promotional genres and persuasion, and a powerful marketing concept (Eisend, 2006; Ming, 2006) which provides trustworthiness about the quality of products or services offered by hotels (Suau-Jiménez, 2012a, 2019). It is partly attained through the hotel’s self-mentioning in websites. When this self-mentioning is agentive with action verbs, the main instantiation is the pronoun we, projecting closeness and assertiveness. However, this self-representation is also construed with depersonalized realizations like the hotel’s proper name, other nominalizations or even pronouns like it and they, which provide attenuating aspects and create a sense of distance. The current corpus-based study of 112 hotel websites hypothesizes that this attenuation may diminish closeness of the authorial voice (Brown & Levinson, 1987), thus displaying authority, following disciplinary and generic constraints. Results suggest that discursive closeness and distance, intertwined with personalized and depersonalized self-representations of the authorial voice, may aid to improve credibility.

This study explores web-based discourse genres and applies a dialogic framework to the study of interpersonality in traveller forums. This genre belongs to the domain of travel and tourism, where the interaction of writers-readers leads towards its ultimate purpose: to persuade others through positive or negative opinions. The theory of Dialogic Action Games (Weigand 2008, 2009, 2010) aids to understand its rationale since these dialogic interactions can be seen as an application of Weigand’s principles (2010), in this case materialized through interpersonal markers (Vande Kopple 1985; Crismore et al. 1993). A corpus of traveller forums (180 threads of conversation) from Trip Advisor was compiled and analyzed. The quantitative and qualitative analyses draw on the notion of voice (White 2003; Hyland 2008), divided into writer’s stance and reader’s engagement. This research shows that they are encoded in a number of interpersonal markers which participate in the genre’s rhetorical characterization.

Tourism 2.0 involves direct e-communication between travellers and the tourism industry, and needs websites that attract customers. Recent research in this field (Austin 2009; Brodie, Hollebeek et al. 2011) suggests that they must also include the co-creation of values that align with the customer in some way. Their design must be persuasive yet trustworthy. This is partly achieved through discursive strategies that reflect the voice of the institution or business (author), and others that engage the customer (reader). This study discusses engagement as a key concept in promotional websites (hotels, tourist guides, etc.) from interpersonality, based on the cometval corpus. Its conclusions note significant and controversial differences on how these e-genres are construed in English and Spanish, with societal implications.

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