Apologies in L1 and lingua franca English: A contrastive pragmatic study of TripAdvisor responses

Abstract

The article reports on a study of restaurant-owners’ public online responses to negative customer reviews on the TripAdvisor website, exploring the differences between the practices used by L1 English and lingua franca English (ELF) speakers when performing public apologies. The focus is on the occurrence and linguistic realizations of two key components of apologies: illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) and accounts of the incident. The results indicate certain differences between the L1 and ELF responses – both in the use of IFIDs (the IFIDs in the ELF responses are more frequently ambiguous in terms of their illocution) and in the amount of facework done (the L1 responses use facework resources more proficiently, while the ELF responses are more face-neutral).