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

Relating at work : facets, dialectics and face

This article examines ‘relating at work’. Recent theorising in pragmatics has drawn attention to the importance of analysing relations, and yet the pragmatic study of relations is now intertwined so closely with the concept of face (e.g. Arundale, 2010a; Holmes et al., 2011; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008) that it might seem the two are synonymous. In this paper, I review this research from a multidisciplinary perspective, and then report a study on ‘relating at work’ in which leaders and interns were interviewed about their experiences of starting work in a culturally unfamiliar setting. I focus on one dialectic, connectedness–separateness, and report the challenges they described in ‘making contact’. In the discussion section and on the basis of my findings, I argue the following points: (a) relating at work entails a complex web of interrelated facets and ‘smooth relations’ is just one of employees’ relational concerns; (b) Relational Dialectic Theory offers much potential for interpersonal pragmatics; (c) dialectic tensions can occur at the individual as well as the interpersonal/relational levels and an interactional achievement analytic perspective needs to be complemented by an individual perspective; (d) Relational Dialect Theory and Face Theory are complementary to each other and should not be conflated

Explicit Intervention for Spanish Pragmatic Development During Short‐Term Study Abroad: An Examination of Learner Request Production and Cognition

The present study examined the impact of pedagogical intervention on students’ request performance during short‐term study abroad (SA). Prior to departure, students received explicit instruction about requests. During their time abroad, they were given tasks to strategically develop their pragmatic competence. Requests were assessed with a discourse completion task. Results indicated that over time the students improved their request performance, as rated by two native Spanish speakers. Examination of the students’ requests revealed that their use of strategies also improved. Retrospective verbal reports (RVRs) performed after the posttests indicated that during second language (L2) Spanish request production, the students attended to politeness, task outcome, and past experiences. In addition, the RVRs indicated that specific sociopragmatic factors and pragmalinguistic strategies targeted during the pragmatic intervention informed learners’ cognition during request planning and production. Findings suggest that when combined with pedagogical intervention, SA has the potential to facilitate students’ L2 pragmatic development

Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations

Despite the increasing interest scholarly research has shown in the study of computer-mediated communication, there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of assumed homogeneity of language usage over the net and focus on the social diversity and variation that characterizes any communication. With this in mind, the present paper is an investigation into the stylistic choices that a particular group of email users made when engaged in a specific activity type. More specifically, it explores the variation in the discourse practices employed to open and close emails in conversation alongside the institutional power of participants and the interactional position of each email contributing to the conversation. To carry out this study a corpus of short email conversations in Peninsular Spanish was collected (n = 240). The analysis focused on the opening and closing sequences of the emails that made up the conversations and considered opening and closing linguistic conventions as discursive practices that members of a community may use strategically. The findings revealed that the discursive practices under scrutiny were subject not only to technological but also to social and interactional constraints and thus highlighted contextual variability. Further, the high degree of sociability in the electronic episodes studied was interpreted as reflecting a ¿people first, business second¿ communicative style

Requests and counters in Russian traffic police officer-citizen encounters: face and identity implications

This paper analyses video recorded interactions between police officers and drivers in traffic stops in Russia. The interactions were recorded via cameras installed on the drivers’ car dashboards, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube; a practice to which over one million Russian motorists have resorted to counterbalance perceived high levels of bribery and corruption (Griaznova 2007). The analysis focuses on responses to opening requests for identification in five different encounters. These show that the drivers repeatedly engage in potentially interpersonally sensitive activities in which the vulnerability of face, especially that of the police officer, is interactionally manifested by launching counter requests in return. The organisation of the request - counter request sequences highlights how face and identity related concerns are interwoven in the participants’ attempts to contest each other’s authority

Denunciation, blame and the moral turn in public life

Public denunciations involve ritual destruction of the moral standing of the target. They are intimately related to the assigning of blame and to the alleged perpetrator’s concomitant denial of wrongdoing. While public denunciations are not a new phenomenon, what has arguably changed in recent years is the loosening of strictures on publicly denouncing immoral behavior, even when (alleged) moral transgressions happen within the remit of traditionally conceived intimate or private relationships, and the broadening of what counts as a public figure. The aim of this paper is to interrogate this moral turn in public life by examining how public denunciations are accomplished in broadcast talk, and the role they play in co-constructing and reaffirming perceived common moral ground. We conclude that while moral criticisms, such as accusing, blaming, denouncing, reproaching, and so on, are evidently oriented as sensitive actions in the public sphere, it appears that constraints on publicly denouncing immoral behavior are on the wane

A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

Meeting abstrac

Erratum to: 36th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s13054-016-1208-6.]

Genomic investigations of unexplained acute hepatitis in children

Since its first identification in Scotland, over 1,000 cases of unexplained paediatric hepatitis in children have been reported worldwide, including 278 cases in the UK1. Here we report an investigation of 38 cases, 66 age-matched immunocompetent controls and 21 immunocompromised comparator participants, using a combination of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and immunohistochemical methods. We detected high levels of adeno-associated virus 2 (AAV2) DNA in the liver, blood, plasma or stool from 27 of 28 cases. We found low levels of adenovirus (HAdV) and human herpesvirus 6B (HHV-6B) in 23 of 31 and 16 of 23, respectively, of the cases tested. By contrast, AAV2 was infrequently detected and at low titre in the blood or the liver from control children with HAdV, even when profoundly immunosuppressed. AAV2, HAdV and HHV-6 phylogeny excluded the emergence of novel strains in cases. Histological analyses of explanted livers showed enrichment for T cells and B lineage cells. Proteomic comparison of liver tissue from cases and healthy controls identified increased expression of HLA class 2, immunoglobulin variable regions and complement proteins. HAdV and AAV2 proteins were not detected in the livers. Instead, we identified AAV2 DNA complexes reflecting both HAdV-mediated and HHV-6B-mediated replication. We hypothesize that high levels of abnormal AAV2 replication products aided by HAdV and, in severe cases, HHV-6B may have triggered immune-mediated hepatic disease in genetically and immunologically predisposed children

Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish

The essays in this collection represent both new theoretical and empirical research and as such they constitute a valuable contribution to the field of pragmatics in general and an essential reference to those researching the pragmatics of ..