Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Depraetere, Ilse
• Decock, Sofie
• Ruytenbeek, Nicolas

Titel

Linguistic (in)directness in twitter complaints: A contrastive analysis of railway complaint interactions

Ist Teil von

• Journal of pragmatics, 2021-01, Vol.171, p.215-233

Ort / Verlag

Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this paper we describe and apply a method probing into linguistic (in)directness in complaint tweets. The sample analyzed consists of French-language Twitter complaint interactions, half of which are between the SNCF (the French National Railway company) and its customers and half between the SNCB (the Belgian National Railway company) and its customers. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, we present and test a methodology that measures the explicitness (or linguistic (in)directness) of complaints, which, we argue, in line with Decock and Depraetere (2018), must be differentiated from perceived (im)politeness or perceived face-threat. Linguistic (in)directness is analyzed in the complete complaint situation, that is, in the first tweet as well as in the ensuing interaction. Secondly, as the sample shows differences in the realization of complaints in two linguistically close communities, we put forward some hypotheses concerning the relative impact of cultural differences and the companies’ response strategy. •We analyze complaint components and how they are linguistically realized.•We differentiate complaint (in)directness and perceived (im)politeness.•Twitter complaints vary in their degree of linguistic (in)directness.•We explore the impact of response strategy on Twitter complaint interaction.•Twitter complaint realizations in French are different in Belgium and France.