TY - JOUR AU - Yonghong, Qian PY - 2020/09/16 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Apologies in Chinese Restaurants' Responses to Negative Online Reviews and Rapport Management-A Cross-cultural Perspective JF - Sinología hispánica. China Studies Review JA - Sinología hispánica VL - 10 IS - 1 SE - DO - 10.18002/sin.v10i1.6318 UR - https://revpubli.unileon.es/index.php/sinologia/article/view/6318 SP - 119-142 AB - The present study, drawing upon Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) Rapport Management framework, presents an analysis of restaurants’ apologies to customers in Chinese CMC. 100 responses <p>by restaurants to customers’ negative reviews on Dianping.com(a Chinese independent third-party<br />reviewing website similar to TripAdvisor) have been collected for our study, and the method of Rhetorical<br />Move Analysis has been used to identify Apologies and accompanying moves in our data. It is revealed<br />that apologies, along with other accompanying moves such as Thanks, Explanations, Repairs, Openings,<br />Closings, Invitations etc., serve as remedial responses to restore rapport or harmony. Considering the<br />public nature of the open online communication, the linguistic domain of apology (including apology<br />expressions, intensification, repetition, honorifics, endearing addressing terms, pronouns, and selfreferring<br />expressions) and content of apology (Accepting or not accepting responsibility) are properly<br />designed and managed by the restaurants’ response writers in order to repair the relationship with the<br />unsatisfied individual customer on the one hand, while maintaining and protecting the restaurants’<br />good reputation with the overhearing audience online on the other hand. We also compared our Chinese<br />online apologies with those in English and Japanese as studied by Morrow &amp; Yamanouchi (2020) in order<br />to reveal some cross-cultural similarities and differences. The findings are expected to provide some<br />insights into the area of cross-cultural studies of online apologies, as well as to be valuable to business<br />professionals who increasingly interact with consumers cross-culturally on the internet.</p> ER -