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Part of
Technology Mediated Service Encounters
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lucía Fernández-Amaya and María de la O Hernández-López
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 300] 2019
► pp. 173–198

Chapter 7
Responding to bargaining moves in a digital era

Refusals of offers on Mercado Libre Ecuador

This chapter investigates the different ways in which sellers on Mercado Libre Ecuador, a virtual market place, refuse bargaining offers. Drawing on work on offers, refusals, bargaining, and computer-mediated discourse analysis, among other areas, and on the basis of a corpus of refusals taken from 227 buyer-vendor exchanges, it examines how refusals are realized, and the extent to which sellers pay attention to interpersonal concerns in their formulation of refusals. Despite the interactions being anonymous, most sellers were found to use one or more verbal strategies with a mitigating function (e.g. affiliative address, greetings, apologies, justifications, expressions of thanks). Possible factors exerting influence on this behaviour are considered. They include, for example, features of the genre and the site’s norms and controls in place.

Keywords: offers, refusals, bargaining, e-service encounters, computer-mediated discourse analysis, participatory websites, Mercado Libre, Ecuadorian Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Bargaining and bartering
    • 2.2Offers and refusals of offers
  • 3.Some features of ML and the corpus employed
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Head act realization of refusals
    • 4.2Accompanying supportive moves
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.300.07pla
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