Denial in managerial responses: Forms, targets and discourse environment

This paper investigates denial, a rapport-challenging speech act. It discusses the performance of denial in review response genre – managerial responses addressing negative online comments made by dissatisfied customers. In this study, act is taken to be instantiated as Deny Problem, one moves constituting genre. The were identified qualitatively analysing total 2,577 produced hotels different star-ratings (2-star 5-star) with aid software Nvivo 12. Problem move and its proximal discourse environment analysed further address three main broad areas interest: forms functions performed targets work, if any, done hotel management mitigate potential damage rapport resulting from Our analysis suggests that they used alone or series, can target asserted information, customer's rationality, hotel's responsibility, seriousness problem. While discursive effort usually repair damaged customers, rather unexpectedly, instances challenge are found proximity denial.