““Please accept my apologies”: English, food, and identity in TripAdvisor discourse

Discourse on food offers interesting viewpoints on diasporic identities. In the wake of previous research (Guzzo & Gallo, 2019), this paper investigates the multi-layered relationship between food, digital discourse and identity in the Loughborough Italian Community. New technologies are transfiguring social interactions and negotiations of social identities. In particular, the exponential growth of the Internet urges us to carefully explore digital networked environments, where people can communicate with each other with no space and time limits. The Web offers new interesting perspectives on the use of English for specific purposes (ESP), a broad research area that, according to Posteguillo (2002), should be sustained by related electronic fields, in order to gain better insights into cyberspace and its users. Our paper considers cross-cultural communication in online discourse and identity in migration contexts. It investigates TripAdvisor interactions in food-related practices through the CMC framework, by taking into account managers’ replies to negative reviews. In particular, we consider digital discourses to provide innovative perspectives on Loughborough Italians’ identity-marking processes in public asynchronous communication, by looking at how pragmatic strategies may be significantly culture-sensitive and how they may reveal cross-cultural differences and/or alignments. Specifically, we investigated two main categories, identified as our variables: apologising and denial of apologies.