Linguistic Features Of English Business Complaint Letters In Achieving The Purpose Of Complaining-An Appraisal System Perspective

When dissatisfaction and troubles happen in trade among companies in different countries, the English Business Complaint Letters (EBCL) are employed very commonly in international business communication. The present research tries to analyze the linguistic features of the thirty English business complaint letters, with the aim of illustrating how the writers of this particular genre fulfill their communicative purposes and interpersonal functions in a most efficient manner, what kind of language choices they make, and why it is in such a case.To satisfy the above-mentioned aim, the present research adopts the approaches mainly based upon the Appraisal System (Martin & White, 2005) to explore the different attitudinal resources associating the communicative purposes in complaint letters. Appraisal System is a newly developed theoretical framework which mainly aims at evaluative resources in texts. It covers all evaluative uses of language, including those by which speakers/writers adopt particular value positions or stances and by which they negotiate their stances with either actual or potential respondents.Based on the genre analysis, English Business Complaint Letters serve the two main communicative purposes: informing and persuading, and through a qualitative and quantitative study of the appraisal resources in thirty English Business Complaint Letters, it has been proved that there are a lot of appraisal resources go through the complete text. All the sub-system of Appraisal, namely Attitude, Engagement and Graduation contribute to the formation of the writers' attitude and position. In addition, to serve different communicative purposes in different writing stages, different kinds of appraisal resources are chosen respectively. From the distribution of appraisal resources in complaint letters, we can work out that the complaint letter writers make great efforts to achieve their specific communicative purposes and thus enhance interpersonal relations with the receivers. It's the communicative purposes that determine the apparent evaluative resources in complaint letters. Based on the findings from the study, we are able to draw a series of implications both about the theoretical development of Appraisal framework and practical complaint letter writing. What's more, it may also provide some implications for pedagogical methods, such as ESP teaching and help students enhance their linguistic techniques in business letter writing.