Gender, culture and digital communication: a contrastive study of women´s reaction to men´s conversational starters on Tinder

In the last few years, and particularly after the situation with COVID-19, the line which separates our “real“ physical lives and our digital lives is growing narrower. Love, sex and dating are no exception. According to Tinder statistics, the generalized lock-down situation resulted in an increase...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Cantos Delgado, Clara
Tipo de recurso: tesis de maestría
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/9265
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/9265
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:811.111:004.773
811.134.2:004.773
Lengua española
Lingüística
Filología inglesa
57 Lingüística
5505.10 Filología
Descripción
Sumario:In the last few years, and particularly after the situation with COVID-19, the line which separates our “real“ physical lives and our digital lives is growing narrower. Love, sex and dating are no exception. According to Tinder statistics, the generalized lock-down situation resulted in an increase of Tinder matches and on the amount of time spent talking to them. In online, inasmuch as in face-to-face interaction, it is men who often approach women and they do so using a variety of different conversational openers. The purpose of this master’s dissertation is to discover what conversational openers (out of the eight studied) are most likely to generate positive responses from women in English and Spanish. In order to evaluate the level of effectiveness of each of the opening lines, a questionnaire was created which consisted of the conversational openers shaped as discourse completion tests. The sample of answers was constituted by 84 answers in Spanish and 51 in English and they were analyzed according to attitude, Conversation Analysis theories, and Herbert’s Taxonomy of Compliment responses (1986). The results from this study show that women preferred greetings over any other conversational starter, even if intellectual compliments and questions for information were generally positively perceived. Moreover, Spanish speakers seemed to be morefond of intently humorous conversational openers (despite their sexual references) than English speakers. However, further studies are needed in order to reach truly statistically relevant conclusions.