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Part of
Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres
Edited by Luz Gil-Salom and Carmen Soler-Monreal
[Dialogue Studies 23] 2014
► pp. 137–164

Chapter 5. Dialogic voices of writers and readers in traveller forums through interpersonality

| IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas), Universitat de Valencia

This study explores web-based discourse genres and applies a dialogic framework to the study of interpersonality in traveller forums. This genre belongs to the domain of travel and tourism, where the interaction of writers-readers leads towards its ultimate purpose: to persuade others through positive or negative opinions. The theory of Dialogic Action Games (Weigand 2008, 2009, 2010) aids to understand its rationale since these dialogic interactions can be seen as an application of Weigand’s principles (2010), in this case materialized through interpersonal markers (Vande Kopple 1985; Crismore et al. 1993). A corpus of traveller forums (180 threads of conversation) from Trip Advisor was compiled and analyzed. The quantitative and qualitative analyses draw on the notion of voice (White 2003; Hyland 2008), divided into writer’s stance and reader’s engagement. This research shows that they are encoded in a number of interpersonal markers which participate in the genre’s rhetorical characterization.

Published online: 10 July 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.23.07sua
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