Construal and impersonalization in German and English: Comparing impersonal pronouns in online hotel reviews

The current work explores the concept of construal in German and English, focusing specifically on the communicative feature of (im)personalization. Incorporating insights from cognitive linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, it takes as object of analysis a means of impersonalization, namely the use of human impersonal pronouns (HIPs) and, using a form-to-function approach, analyzes the dedicated HIPs man and one, as well as impersonally used 2nd personal pronouns du and you regarding their featural composition and pragmatic effects. The data consists of two parallel corpora of negative online hotel reviews taken from Booking.com. The findings reveal that German-speaking reviewers make use of HIPs more frequently and use the ‘less personal’ of the HIPs (man) as compared to English-speaking reviewers (who use the ‘more personal’ you), confirming the established contrast of German speakers using more impersonalized language. They further uncover a flexibility in the distribution and usage of German man that is not yet widely established in the literature, showing that German speakers use man in a myriad of ways to simultaneously impersonalize certain aspects of their reviews and indicate relevance to the reader. The findings point to a mixture of typological and linguacultural influences at play regarding the HIPs’ role in impersonalization in German and English negative online hotel reviews.