Politeness strategies in customer-company communication on social media in Turkish and in English

This paper deals with politeness strategies in both Turkish and English language in responses to complaints and compliments on two major airline companies' social media. The analysis is based on Brown and Levinson's view on politeness and their positive and negative politeness strategies. As their work does not cover all the possible strategies and is tailored for a specific context, I will expand my analysis by using ideas introduced by postmodern researchers, namely Spencer-Oatey, Decock and Depraetere. The methodology consisted of gathering all the possible replies to compliments and complaints made by the customer-service agents of the said companies and analysing them in accordance with the strategies described by Brown and Levinson. After that I focused on the classification of compliments introduced by Decock and Depraetere, and Spencer-Oatey, respectively. To finish off the analysis, I analysed the direct and indirect speech acts in the replies to complaints and saw that United Airlines has a more informal and friendly approach, while Turkish Airlines nurtures a more distant relationship with their customers. The analysis leads us to conclude that Brown and Levinson's theory makes for a good base for research but needs to be supported by other theories and views on politeness