Interpersonal work in service encounters on Mercado Libre Argentina: a comparison between buyer and vendor patterns across two market domains

Powell, H. and Placencia, Maria Elena (2019) Interpersonal work in service encounters on Mercado Libre Argentina: a comparison between buyer and vendor patterns across two market domains. In: Félix-Brasdefer, C. and Placencia, Maria Elena (eds.) Pragmatic Variation in Service Encounter Interactions across the Spanish-Speaking World. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9781138479593. (In Press)

Abstract

This paper looks at interpersonal work in vendor-buyer interactions on Mercado Libre Argentina, an online marketplace. It examines how users address (or not) interpersonal aspects of the service encounter across two distinct market domains: pets and toys. Based on a corpus of 145 interactions (290 individual posts), selected at random from these two domains, it focuses on the realization of two core elements of the transaction: openings and closings. In addition, it looks at how both vendors and buyers employ forms of address as a resource for interpersonal communication. Overall, there were more similarities than differences. For example, all users overwhelmingly favored informal address. However, some clear distinctions between buyers and vendors could be discerned, particularly, how each user group structured their posts: buyers were far less restricted by formal convention than vendors, often omitting greetings and/or leave-takings.

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