POLITENESS AND LSP BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL: HOTEL REVIEWS IN SPANISH AND ENGLISH

Abstract

This paper analyses hotel reviews in Spanish and English to explore the evolution of this genre as a consequence of its availability on the globalised tourism market. A corpus -based comparison (monolingual and bilingual contrastive) is carried out of hedging and intensifying strategies (Briz, 2001; Albelda, 2007) used to modify semantically negative adjectives. The distribution of these strategies is observed across 3 corpora comprising respectively: reviews in Spanish published on Spanish platforms; reviews in Spanish published on international platforms; reviews in English published on international platforms. Quantitative results show that global circulation of this genre promotes convergence towards the international genre rather than preservation of the national discourse tradition; such convergence discourages the use of linguistic traits typical of informal settings, giving rise to a new form of specialised communication.