Face-threatening e-mail complaint negotiation in a multilingual business environment: a discursive and contextual analysis of customer disagreement strategies

Refusals and disagreements are usually considered ‘dispreferred responses’ and ‘face-threatening’ speech acts that therefore tend to be linguistically softened (e.g. Hayashi 1996, Felix-Brasdefer 2006). Until now, they have mainly been studied in oral and everyday communication, and much less so in written electronic communication and business contexts. In this paper we offer a discursive and contextual analysis of customer e-mails expressing disagreement with a complaint refusal. Our study builds on an authentic corpus of German-, French- and English-language business e-mail correspondence on complaint refusals (a total of 100 e-mail sequences), which was gathered at the sales department of a Belgian multinational. Apart from this ethnographic approach, we rely on research in pragmatics and genre-analysis (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Bhatia 1993) to determine the generic structure of customer disagreement e-mails. In particular, we distinguish several moves and examine their linguistic realization: Which disagreement strategies are used, what is their level of directness, and to what extent are they internally and externally modified? We are also interested in how these different realizations of disagreement are influenced by contextual (situational and cultural) factors. Our results reveal a preference for direct strategies. In addition, we found that the customers’ disagreement statements, as opposed to the employees’ refusal notifications, tend to be accompanied by upgrading internal and external modification. These results indicate that when conveying non-acceptance, transactional and interactional communicative goals are negotiated differently depending on context (everyday vs. business context; employee vs. customer perspective). Furthermore, the comparative analysis of the German-, French- and English-language corpus showed differences in the number of direct strategies and aggravating devices, pointing, among other things, to a more direct and confrontational communication style in French. These results will be compared with previous cross-cultural studies involving (one of) these three languages. Finally, when looking for contextual factors explaining the customer’s reaction, we were able to link disagreement statements to a series of variables ranging from complaint type and reason for refusal to the gravity of the complaint and the employee-customer relationship