Estrategias de cortesía y valoraciones negativas en el comercio electrónico: Un estudio contrastivo chino-español

The negative reviews written by customers of products and services purchased over the Internet have become a powerful tool in favor of the consumers. Thanks to this, these consumers generally express their complaints about the lack of adequacy between the product description and the product finally received, which may cause a negative effect on the company's image. In the framework of linguistic politeness theories and based on a corpus composed of six hundred negative opinions collected from the Amazon website, the present paper intends to make a contrastive analysis of the politeness strategies between Chinese and Spanish consumers' negative reviews, focusing on the sociocultural perspective and combining qualitative with quantitative methodologies. Results from this study will reveal how the Chinese politeness strategies are oriented towards the construction of a positive image while the Spanish ones are directed towards a more negative image. It also contains an analysis of adjusts in the linguistic politeness models in respect of the traditional politeness.