Cultural Values and Digital Discourse An Intercultural Communication Approach to the Transactional Discourse of Spanish and US Sales Websites
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the cultural dimension of masculinity (Hofstede 1991) on the linguistic variables that shape the transactional discourse of Spanish and US sales websites when transmitting information about their products. It is hypothesized that the different cultural orientations that both countries hold with respect to Hofstede’s masculinity indexes may promote different professional discourse cultures. The corpus consists of 100 sales websites from the toy industry (50 from Spain and 50 from the USA). Both a qualitative and quantitative analysis is followed. The results obtained reveal significant differences in the way Spanish and US companies describe and promote their products on-line as a result of their different cultural values.
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Copyright (c) 2014 Francisco Miguel Ivorra Pérez
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