Global Expectations, Local Realities: All-Inclusive Hotel Reviews and Responses on TripAdvisor

In this article we examine online reviews and hotel responses of Spanish hotel chains in two overseas tourist destinations: the Caribbean and Mexico. Drawing on a dataset of 96 hotel reviews we examine the intercultural experience of travellers as mediated by direct or indirect prior knowledge of the tourist destination and subsequent knowledge that results from visiting the host country and interacting with the locals, primarily with resort staff. The analysis shows, on the one hand, the global stance taken by the travellers to construct their reviews where the creation of an “intercultural space” is typically resisted and challenged in favour of expected global standards. The hotels’ responses, on the other hand, are constructed from a local rather than a global perspective. Findings reveal the intercultural tension that arises when lived experience of the specific culture cannot be married with the expectancies of homogeneity created by an increasingly globalised experience of tourism. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of interculturality, as conceived of in pragmatics, in a contemporary era characterised by discontent with digital information systems. It includes a discussion of some of the challenges in deploying the contrastive pragmatics toolkit to capture the intercultural space reported here and the extent to which it allows us to portray interculturality in the present day

Mobility and Stasis: Migrant portraits from a Madrid Market

The chapter documents some of the linguistic practices of two Latin Americans in a Madrid indoor market as they engage in everyday work activities. It reveals two different portraits of mobility, along a fluid-fixed continuum as crystalised in the fluctuance and permanence of their linguistic practices across and within market boundaries. Overall, the analysis of ethnographically-gathered data, offers a snapshot of the connections between linguistic practices and contexts of mobility in a workplace setting. Specifically, fixedness was found in a context of limited mobility, and hybridity in one of general mobility. They were both associated to the characters’ respective migrant trajectories and oriented to as valued, desirable and contextually fitting

Leveraging Relations in Diaspora

This Element expands the horizon of sociopragmatic research by offering a first inquiry into the sociocultural norms that underlie the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relations in a diasporic context. Based on accounts of the practices that Spanish-speaking Latin Americans engage in pursuit of employment, primarily gathered in life-story interviews, it captures the social reality of members of this social group as they build interpersonal relations and establish new contractual obligations with each other away from home. It examines occupational recommendations as a diasporic relational practice whereby the relationship between the recommender and the recommendee becomes part of the value being exchanged and the moral order on which the practice is established and maintained through an interlocked system of favours. The Element offers new social pragmatics insights beyond the dyad in a contemporary globalised context characterised by social inequality

Telephone conversation openings across languages, cultures and settings

The organization of telephone conversation has received much scholarly attention since Schegloff’s pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s (Schegloff 1968, 1979). There are several reasons why researchers have been fascinated by telephone conversations in spite of their “apparently perfunctory character” (Schegloff 1986: 113). First, telephone calls are arguably the second most important site of speech interaction after face-to-face conversation. For tens of thousands of years face-to-face conversation was the only mode of speech interaction that humans had for communication. However, with the invention of the telephone in 1876 and its subsequent popularization, a new mode of communication was born. In today’s rapidly shrinking world of telecommunications, many people, particularly in the urban areas, are spending as much, if not more, time on telephone conversation than face-to-face interaction. Telephone conversation has thus gained a special status for students of language and social interaction. Second, for those interested in naturally occurring talk, the telephone offers a source of good quality data, unlike face-to-face conversations which often come with noise and other disturbances and complications. It is true that telephone calls are subject to a much more restrictive set of ‘ecological constraints’ than face-to-face conversations; for example, participants have no access to visual cues such as facial expressions and gestures. However, this turns out to be both a limitation and an advantage. From the analyst’s point of view, one of the attractions of telephone conversational data lies precisely in its absence of visual information. With telephone data, ‘what you hear is what you get’, which means that the same amount of speech information available to the participants is also available to the analyst. This contrasts significantly with recordings of face-to-face talk, where the analyst may not have access to visual cues, unless he also has a video recording. Yet another reason for the appeal of telephone conversations -- perhaps the most attractive one for many -- is the possibility of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural generalisations. As a type of speech event, telephone conversations the world over can in principle be defined and delimited by a set of organizational tasks, including such elements as making contact, establishing identity, exchanging preliminaries, presenting reason-for-call, managing topics, moving into closing, terminating calls, etc. With reference to these parameters researchers can chart variations in how these organizational tasks are handled in different linguistic, social and cultural settings. Thus, it has been suggested that “when it comes to making comparisons across linguistic and cultural settings, telephone conversations provide us with as close a situation as we could get to controlled experimental conditions.” (Luke and Pavlidou 2002: 6

Intercultural Communication in a globalised world: the case of Spanish

In this chapter we offer a précis of research conducted on intercultural communication in Spanish and present an analysis of the construction of interculturality between speakers of Spanish in contemporary contexts resulting from globalisation. We start by reviewing the studies conducted on the topic from a contrastive pragmatics angle as cross-cultural findings have often been used to predict the prospective intercultural contact between members of different Spanish lingua-cultures. We then turn our attention to constructivist studies of encounters between speakers of different Spanish-speaking backgrounds in transnational settings. Their differences may reside in their ethnolinguistic identities, the varieties of Spanish they speak and their access to resources, among others. What these speakers have in common is the fact that they have had limited contact with one another in the past despite speaking the same basic language: Spanish. The discussion of such encounters is illustrated by previously unexamined instances of interculturality in communicative settings such as transnational service encounters, interactions in contexts of voluntary migration, multilingual settings and tourism

Disattending Customer Dissatisfaction on Facebook: A Case Study of a Slovenian Public Transport Company

In an increasingly mobile and social world, the marketing battle is going digital. A good example was advertising for the 2014 Brazil World Cup.1 Traditional media sectors, including TV and radio, enjoyed their usual advertising revenue but the real winners, in terms of direction of marketing resources and effort, were social media such as Twitter, You Tube and Facebook

Keeping the pitch on track: spatiotemporal challenges in ambulant vending on a Buenos Aires trainline

This article examines ambulant vendors’ labour on a Buenos Aires trainline. It explores how vendors employ a range of verbal and embodied resources to navigate the challenges of sustaining attention from commuters and manage the progressivity of their sales pitch as they achieve individual service encounters and deal with physical obstructions intrinsic to the local ecology of the train and the contingencies of earning a livelihood on the move. An interactional pragmatics analysis of vendors’ working practices as video-recorded by them coupled with ethnographic observations, reveals the complex interplay of verbal and embodied cues, spatial arrangements, and temporal constraints in relation to the progressivity of their sales pitch. The findings challenge long-held negative views of vendors’ presence in public space by highlighting the methodical approach, dexterity, and civility of their working practices, and how their labour fills a gap in the market. The article provides new insights into the dynamics of urban labour in public spaces and the intrinsicality of multimodality to manoeuvre round the unequal conditions these workers inhabit

'Thanks for nothing': Impoliteness in service calls

Calls for service are typically mundane mediated encounters between a call agent and a customer. They are generally routinized as evidenced by the way in which the participants engage in the same tasks in much the same way. In cases such as these, face does not tend to become interactionally salient. The main assumption in primarily transactional encounters is that participants will co-operate in pursuit of their interactional objective, provided that the participants share the same interactional project (e.g. asking for and receiving information). In this customer-oriented context, the extent of co-operative involvement is typically demonstrated through the mutual coordination of topic direction, frequent positive feedback, e.g. continuers (Schegloff 2007), as well as repair when things go wrong and when absence of intersubjectivity may jeopardise the achievement of the interactional project. In addition, the extent of co-operative involvement also depends on agent’s personal interactional style in handling service calls. This paper analyses the saliency of face in three instances of interactional trouble drawn from a corpus of over 29 hours of calls to a public utility. Drawing on Goffman (1967) and on some techniques from conversation analysis, it examines different interactional sequences in which a female call agent attempts to get rid of the customers as illustrated by the way in which she withdraws (Duranti, 1992) at interactional junctures when the provision of information is typically offered, how she assigns responsibility to third parties and positions herself as subordinate to the institution, offers unreliable information which is then brought to light in the call. This is further modulated by the agent’s tedious monotone displaying disaffiliation and non-recipiency. The paper argues that these moves help to index impoliteness and this is partly attributed to larger socioeconomic factors relating to the type of company examined and the essential service it offers

Introduction: Language Practices and Processes among Latin Americans in Europe

This book covers most of the sociolinguistic issues that have interested us overvarious years of conducting research on Spanish-speaking Latin Americans(SsLA) in Spain and the UK.1 We were able to see lots of commonalities but alsoimportant differences regarding the ways in which this multinational social groupnavigates the structural and material conditions of the different European societiesin which they are present. It is clear that being a ‘Latin American’ has a differentsignificance in different places in Europe. The presence of Latin Americansis recognised in some European countries, while in others they remain invisible.Not all members of this SsLA group come from the same regions (or countries);in fact, some of them have experienced previous migratory journeys. They arenot all from the same social class, they speak Spanish in many different ways,they have organised themselves in varied ways in diaspora (some create socialenclaves and strong networks to remain together, while some others prefer tokeep apart), and they all respond in different ways to what they perceive as hostileenvironments. In sum, as discussed in the following, they navigate the diasporic conditions in various ways. These observations led us to invite colleagues working with the same social group in other regions of Europe. Our aim was to bring together current research on Ss LAs to understand their experiences and the role of languages in their diasporic lives. We wanted to capture the sociolinguistic phenomena under study, considering the advantages, but also the constraints and often exclusion that the subjects have experienced across the main European localities in which they have lived or which they have traversed en route to somewhere else. This includes the cultural meanings they have constructed and some poignant emotional aspects of their lives in specific places along their migratory trajectories, but also the ways in which they deal with the obstacles they have encountered on their journeys

Language Practices and Processes among Latin Americans in Europe

Language Practices and Processes among Latin Americans in Europe is an innovative and thematically organised collection of studies dedicated to contemporary sociolinguistic research on Latin Americans across European contexts.This book captures some of the language practices and experiences of Spanish speaking Latin Americans (SsLAs) across various regions in Europe, addressing language uses, language ideologies and experiences with languages in particular geographical contexts and settings across the ten chapters. The book provides a new lens to study the sociolinguistics of the migratory trajectories of Spanish-speaking Latin American migrants and the situated practices and processes in which they participate in their host societies.The comprehensive volume will be of interest to researchers in the area of Spanish sociolinguistics, sociology of language and language ideology