CHAPTER 3 Address Forms and Relational Work in E-commerce: The Case of Service Encounter Interactions in MercadoLibre Ecuador

María Elena Placencia

1 Introduction

It has long been recognized that address forms play a central role in express- ing interpersonal relations through language in everyday life. This idea, epito- mized in Brown and Gilman’s (1960) influential work on pronominal address, with the T-V distinction, as well as Brown and Ford’s (1972 [1961]) classic study on nominal forms, has been taken up by other scholars over time. As Knapp, for example, put it in the 1970s:

[t]he way we address another person may be quantitatively brief, but it may say volumes about the relationship we have with that person. We are able to communicate . . . how well we are acquainted with them, whether we are angry or affectionate toward them, and whether the situation is a formal or informal one [ . . . ] (Knapp 1978, 158)

At present, however, it is acknowledged that through the use of address forms we do not simply reflect particular relationships but we actually negotiate them (cf. McCarthy and O’Keefe 2003) and may (re)create particular ideolo- gies of interpersonal relations (Fitch 1998). From a politeness perspective, which I adopt in this study, address forms serve as one means of realizing what Locher (2006, 4) refers to as relational work—“the ‘work’ individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others”—(see also Locher and Watts 2005), or what Spencer-Oatey (2008 [2000], 12) calls ‘rapport management’: the use of language in the “manage- ment of social relations”. Address forms fall under the stylistic domain in Spencer-Oatey’s rapport management framework, contributing to setting the tone of an interaction as “serious or joking”, for example (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000], 21). Indeed, in a recent work on address in French, German, English and Swedish, Clyne, Norrby and Warren (2009) highlight this central function of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004260160_004 38 Placencia address forms as tools for the management of social relationships. They assert that modes of address allow users, among other things, to “express a degree of social distance, common ground and group boundaries” (2009, 79). To use a single example to illustrate the range of meanings that address forms can convey, and therefore the different functions that they can perform in relational work, from a survey which I carried out of studies on address forms in Ecuadorian and Colombian Spanish (Placencia 2010a, 367), various meanings surfaced, associated with the pronouns of address tú, vos, usted and sumercé. They include the following: respect, closeness/trust (confianza),1 dis- tance, familiarity, solidarity or a lack of it, intimacy, warmth (calor humano), affection (in)equality, hierarchy, impatience, anger, annoyance, condescen- sion, contempt, servility and humiliation. These different meanings highlight the fact that address forms can be employed to various effects: to construct, enhance or threaten interpersonal relations, to keep one’s boundaries intact or to dispense with them, etc. When it comes to service encounters, address forms, together with other forms such as greetings and politeness formulas, have been found to play a role in constructing a (face-to-face) service encounter interaction as respectful and deferential, perhaps, friendly and egalitarian, or maybe overfriendly or abusive in some respects (see Section 2). Address usage in e-service encounters, on the other hand, has, to the best of my knowledge, received very little or no attention.2 However, the growth of e-commerce over recent years makes exam- ining such usage a timely and revealing exercise. One of the features of interest in e-service encounters is precisely the rela- tional aspect of the interaction: the extent to which, and the ways in which, participants invest in the service relationship while interacting in a virtual context and within the constraints of the online medium. This is what I aim to examine in a corpus of interactions drawn from MercadoLibre (ML hence- forth) Ecuador, an online market place (see Section 4), through the analysis of address usage. The present study forms part of a broader study on relational work in service encounters in e-commerce where I examine the structure of such encounters in terms of ‘discursive moves’ (cf. Locher 2006; Miller and

1 Relationships of confianza are characterized by “closeness and a sense of deep familiarity” (Thurén 1988, 222) and certain behavioural expectations (e.g. that one can count on help when in need) according to the degree of confianza obtaining between the participants. See also Fitch (1998), among others, for a definition of this notion. 2 Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch (2008) examine politeness phenomena in e-commerce, but their focus is on the content of interactive webpages rather than actual service encounter interactions.