Decock, Sofie, Depraetere, Ilse & Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2021. Linguistic (in)directness in twitter complaints: A contrastive analysis of railway complaint interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 171. 215–234. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2020.09.026.
Decock, Sofie & Depraetere, Ilse. 2018. (In)directness and complaints: A reassessment, Journal of pragmatics 132. 33–46. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2018.04.010.
Eser, Miryam, Tov, Eva & Meyer, Pascale. 2012. Deutsche in der Schweiz – Ähnlich und doch verschieden. Wien/ Berlin: Lit.
Herring, Susan C. (ed.). 1996. Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.
House, Juliane & Kasper, Gabriele. 1981. Politeness Markers in English and German. In Coulmas, Florian (ed). Volume 2 Conversational Routine. Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter Mouton.157-186. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110809145.157 (24 October 2023)
Kunkel, Melanie. 2020. Kundenbeschwerden im Web 2.0: eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zur Pragmatik von Beschwerden im Deutschen und Italienischen. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.
Meinl, Marja E. 2010. Electronic Complaints: An Empirical Study on British English and German Complaints on eBay. Bonn: Dissertation Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:5-21224 (10 October 2023)
Trosborg, Anna. 2011. Interlanguage Pragmatics : Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Reprint 2011. Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Willmeroth, Sandra & Hämmerli, Fredy. 2023. Exgüsi: ein Knigge für Deutsche und Schweizer zur Vermeidung grober Missverständnisse. Zürich: Orell Füssli.
Abstract –Nowadays, digital media offer a great opportunity to write and publish personal opinions, commentary, and evaluations on the Internet. The linguistic act that highlights the negative experiences and the dissatisfaction of the writer is defined as the speech act "complaint".
Research in the field of "computer-mediated communication (CMC)" (Herring 1996: 1) points out differences in the way people complain: For example, German writers seem to choose more direct strategies in their complaint communication than British or Italian writers (Kunkel 2020; Meinl 2010). Previous research has mainly investigated complaint communication in online comments on Facebook (Kunkel 2020) or reviews on eBay (Meinl 2010), and in oral interaction (House/ Kasper 1981; Trosborg 1995) and has mostly focused on cross-cultural comparisons. In contrast, the interlinguistic study of online complaints in the German-speaking area has received little to no attention.
The aim of this talk is to present a corpus-based study of the different strategies used in the formulation of complaints in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) using Decock/Depratere’s (2018) taxonomy. This recent taxonomy focuses on linguistic (in)directness and separates the degree of implicitness or explicitness as well as the degree of face-threat in complaint formulation. It accordingly identifies the four constitutive components that can be explicitly expressed in a complaint by the complainer: (a) a (past) action or occurrence (the complainable) (b) the negative evaluation of the complainable (c) the assumed involvement of the complainee, and (d) the wish for the situation to be remedied (Decock/Depraetere 2018; Decock et al. 2021). Therefore, the more components the complaint contains, the higher the degree of explicity according to the taxonomy of linguistic (in)directness. In German speaking regions, the study of linguistic (in)directness is particularly relevant, as stereotypes such as The Indirectness of Swiss (Eser et al. 2012: 28) or Die Berliner Schnauze (Willmeroth & Hämmerli 2023: 96) observable in everyday language discourse point to regional differences in communicative behavior.
This study is based on a large corpus of negative online reviews published on the website Google-Maps between 2021 and 2023. In order to mark visible changes in the strategy of complaint communication and thus to compare the levels of linguistic (in)directness in Google reviews within the German language, I have chosen to select complaints to large gym chains with a two- or one-star rating, as these ratings indicate a negative and unsatisfying experience and can therefore be classified as complaints.
The results show a clear pattern in the degree of linguistic (in)directness of the initial complaint in Google reviews. One- and two-star reviews in Northern Germany are more explicitly formulated than reviews in Southern regions. The complaints in the Southern region more often show, for example, a detailed description of the unsatisfying action or occurrence (the complainable) than the negative reviews in the Northern regions, which contrariwise tend to focus more on the description of the negative evaluation of the complainable. On the whole, the analysis of the online complaints shows considerable diatopic variation in the combination of complaint strategies.