This article presents the results of a study carried out with Spanish University
students on their use of strategies of (in)directness when expressing complaints,
disapprovals and disagreements in English and Spanish. We adopt a role-play
eliciting procedure for the collection of what a speaker thinks and what s/
he
actually says in a given situation. Our results show a tendency to mitigate the
actual words uttered with regard to the thought processes in both languages.
However, while in English students show a preference for conventional indirectness,
in Spanish there is a greater variation in the strategies employed.
Thus, mitigation, especially in Spanish, is often realised by means of the co-occurrence
of negative and positive politeness strategies across several speech
acts, thus performing complex utterances. These results point at an awareness of
students’ attempts to adapt to the model of indirectness that is assumed of the
English culture, vs. the model of directness associated to the Spanish culture.
En este trabajo se propone un análisis del estilo comunicativo que aparece en reseñas realizadas por huéspedes de hoteles y sus consiguientes respuestas, en la popular plataforma de viajes y turismo TripAdvisor. El objetivo es identificar y analizar el conjunto de rasgos lingüísticos de estilo que aparecen tanto en las opiniones de los usuarios como en las respuestas de los responsables de las empresas hoteleras. A partir del análisis de la variación de estilo sobre un corpus de reseñas y respuestas, el estudio muestra que tanto huéspedes como hoteles exhiben rasgos de adaptabilidad al medio para alcanzar sus finalidades comunicativas, pero muestran estilos comunicativos diferentes y divergentes, por no decir encontrados y opuestos, reflejo de las realidades e imágenes sociales de los usuarios y de las audiencias potenciales que posee cada uno, enfrentando percepciones polivalentes de la norma lingüística al tiempo que ampliando las posibilidades de innovación y expresión lingüística.
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