Customer complaints and disagreements in a multilingual business environment. A discursive-pragmatic analysis

Abstract This paper probes into authentic CMC business complaints and disagreements by offering a discourse-pragmatic analysis of complaint negotiation e-mails written by French- and German-language customers. The analysis focuses on an identification and description of complaint and disagreement strategies, and on the presence of internal and external modifiers. Our data, gathered ethnographically at the sales department of a Belgian multinational, shows how the customer’s discourse evolves from more neutral, problem-oriented, routinized formulations in first complaints towards more confrontational, person-oriented, ad hoc formulations in disagreement e-mails as reactions to complaint refusals. This discursive change goes hand in hand with an increase in the use of direct speech act realizations and upgraders. As it appears, in the course of the complaint negotiation, face-threat to the speaker outweighs consideration of the addressee’s face needs. The most notable cross-cultural difference we found between German- and French-speaking customers is a more explicit style in German and a more confrontational style in French, with cross-cultural differences gaining weight at the expense of international communicative norms in less routinized messages. Finally, the results of our study urge us to reassess concepts of directness, and on a societal level, they serve to promote intercultural awareness in business contexts.