Additive Focus Adverbs Presuppose Content to Manage Rapport in Responses to Negative Hotel Reviews

Abstract

The current study delves into the interpersonal functions of additive focus adverbs (henceforth AFAs) in online communication, an area that has received limited attention in empirical pragmatic research. By elucidating the presuppositions triggered by AFAs, this investigation aims to demonstrate how these adverbs contribute to managing rapport in responses to negative hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. A combined corpus and content analysis reveals that the AFA again, which triggers known presuppositions, effectively fulfills a hotel’s relational goal while implicitly protecting its identity face. Furthermore, by presupposing both new and known but discourse-new content, the AFA also enhances the understanding of a hotel’s responsible image while concurrently maintaining the quality faces of both the hotel and its reviewers. Overall, these findings indicate that the employment of AFAs in responses represents a successful strategy to foster positive customer-hotel rapport by implicitly attending to the three bases of rapport. These findings provide novel insights into the interpersonal functions of AFAs in handling customer complaints, further enriching the understanding of moves and strategies in negative review responses.