Closeness and distance through the agentive authorial voice

Abstract

<jats:p xml:lang="en">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 &amp; 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.</jats:p>

Reader Comments Agentive Power in COVID-19 Digital News Articles: Challenging Parascientific Information?

“…In regards to distance, [20] (p. 78) describes this pragmatic strategy as "a specific way through which authors project authority by means of diverse linguistic choices including objective and/or depersonalised realisations with the deliberate intention to show credibility". Therefore, in sharp contrast with closeness, distance can be linked to objectivity, invisibility and professionalism.…”

“…Since this kind of communication entails strong interpersonal discourse characteristics, two aspects seemed worth analysing in the construction of commenters' authority: authorial voice and content. The authorial voice usually takes stance markers that favour assertiveness and closeness to readers, such as self-mentions, but also other markers such as hedges, that mitigate a too strong stance [20]. Likewise, commenters can resort to boosters as grammatical enhancers, or attitudinals, which provide a subjective, persuasive shade, principally in the form of qualifying adjectives.…”

“…HP2. Readers' authorial self-construction of authority may include closeness and distance pragmatic strategies [20], using stance markers, but also resorting to impersonalisation, depersonalization or heteroglossic strategies, in an attempt to reduce an excessive personal assertiveness, thus projecting a more convincing authorial voice.…”

“…The Ant.Conc 3.5.8. concordancing tool has been used to work out the absolute frequency of the different closeness and distance pragmatic strategies found in the two corpora analysed as well as their lexico-grammatical uses. To do so, we have followed the categories and linguistic realizations previously dealt with in the literature [20,21,[25][26][27]. Due to the constraints imposed by the AntConc Software to identify all the strategies considered in the analysis, some of them have been manually counted.…”

“…An attributional marker can be seen in example (19), in which the writer makes an explicit reference to the UK health minister. Lastly, in example (20), the writer also resorts to the use of an endorsement strategy, as it is the case with the results of the vaccines shown in trials.…”