Publication:
Closeness and distance through the agentive authorial voice: construing credibility in promotional discourse.

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416301-Article Text-1469611-1-10-20200627.pdf(642.9 KB)
Date
2020
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Authors
Suau Jiménez, Francisca
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Publisher
Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes.416301
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
Abstract
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 & 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.
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Credibility , Persuasion , Closeness , Distance , Agentive self mentioning , Attenuation , Hotel websites
Citation
International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 20 (1), 2020
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10201/97343
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Collections
IJES 2020, v. 20, n. 1
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