speech acts, verbal antagonism, face threat, lingua franca, ELF, L1 English, customer service discourse, relational work, facework

This paper reports on a sociopragmatic study of restaurant-owners' public responses to negative customer reviews on TripAdvisor. These responses are typically apologetic, characterized by an acceptance of criticism and a high level of deference towards the customer. However, this study focuses on those responses which express an oppositional stance - contradicting or rejecting the reviewer's claims, and sometimes directing personal criticism at the reviewer. TripAdvisor is a translocal site of interaction - locally rooted, yet with a global reach. In this study I explore how this translocality is manifested in both discourse-semantic and lexicogrammatical features of oppositional responses. Informed by sociopragmatic theories of facework, rapport management and relational work, and analyzing a corpus consisting of responses by L1 English speakers and L2 (ELF) speakers, I analyze the discursive mechanisms through which speech acts indexing oppositional stance are expressed by L1 and ELF speakers. Specifically, I investigate speakers' choices of resources for mitigating or aggravating such speech acts, and I identify recurrent patterns of distribution within the corpus that may point to broader contrastive differences between L1 and ELF sociopragmatic practices. This reveals the unexpected diversity and fluidity of what may at first sight appear to be a highly conventional genre.