A Pragmatic Study Of Online Complaining Under Rapport Challenge Orientation

Complaining,a prevalent phenomenon in daily communication,is to show disapproval towards some affair.It can reflect the mental state of addresser,and thus is classified into the Expressives of speech act category.Although the speech act has been studied extensively and thoroughly in recent years,most of the studies are centered on complaining in face-to-face communication,and the related studies on online complaining are considerably scarce.Hence,the study intends to investigate the realization patterns and corresponding linguistic realizations of rapport-threatening in online complaining gathered from negative reviews of hotel on TripAdvisor,and in consequence explores the rapport challenge orientation embodied in the data.On the basis of the Rapport Management Theory(Spencer-Oatey,2000;2002;2008)and the realization patterns of complaining(Laforest,2002),the study builds a modified analyzing framework and attempts to answer the following two questions:(1)What are realization patterns employed in online complaining about hotel?(2)How do these realization patterns of complaining threaten rapport and embody the rapport challenge orientation?A total of 200 negative reviews posted on hotel's homepages are collected,among which 195 episodes are identified as the valid data.With adopting the approach of CMDA(Computermediated Discourse Analysis)(Herring,2004),the study firstly analyzes the realization patterns of complaining employed by dissatisfied customers and the frequencies and distribution of them,and then examines the linguistic realizations of rapport-threatening according to different realization patterns of complaining and finally investigates the rapport challenge orientation embodied in the data.Firstly,based on the classification proposed by Laforest(2002),the study found seven realization patterns of online complaining about hotel,including Allusion to the Complainable,Mentioning the Complainable,Expression of Disapproval,Justification of Disapproval,Request the Complainee to Justify the Complainable,Request a Change of Complainee and Blame.It is found that Mentioning the Complainable ranks the first place with a proportion of 67.5%,and Expression of Disapproval comes to the second place,and Allusion to the Complainable is observed only once(accounting for 0.1%)in the data and becomes the least frequent one.Apart from that,every category of complaining realization pattern is examined in order to reveal its sub-categories and linguistic characteristics.For instance,the most frequent realization pattern,Mentioning the Complainable can be realized through the following typical forms: C dose/is doing/did X;C doesn't/ is not doing/ didn't do X;there is X;there is no X;X is [negative evaluative expressions];etc.With regard to the pattern of expressing disapproval towards complainable,three sub-categories including negative observation,expressing negative feelings and making standpoint are examined.Secondly,the study examines the rapport-threatening categories and the linguistic realizations according to different complaining realization patterns on account of Rapport Management Theory(Spencer-Oatey,2008).The rapport-threatening categories include quality face-threatening,social identity face-threatening and equity right-threatening.As to the linguistic realizations of rapport-threatening,Mentioning the Complainable comprises extreme case formulation,comparative expression and negative evaluative expression.Expression of Disapproval includes insulting expression,sarcastic expression and criticism towards complainables.Besides,Request the Complainee to Justify the Complainable is found to threaten the rapport mainly through query,while Request a Change of Complainee mainly through order.The last one,Blame,includes denouncement and criticism towards complainee.According to statistics,quality face-threatening takes up nearly 97.6% among all the categories,whereas the rest,social identity face-threatening and equity right-threatening,only account for a relatively small ratio.Only the linguistic realization,order,involves equity right-threatening as well as the social identity face-threatening.Both the negative evaluative expression(in Mentioning the Complainable)and the criticism towards complainee(in Blame)threaten quality face and social identity face,and the other linguistic realizations merely threaten the quality face of complainee.In addition,the study counts up the frequencies of those rapportthreatening realizations in corresponding complaining patterns,and finds that a large proportion of Mentioning the Complainable(91.3%)involves rapport-threatening.Blame ranks the second place with a ratio of 80%,and the proportions of rapport-threatening in the rest of the categories are 45.5%,37.9% and 10% respectively.Hence,rapport-threatening is prevalent in online complaining about hotel,which in return embodies the rapport challenge orientation of the data.Besides,as for the rapport challenge orientation embodied in the data,the study examines offensive utterances such as denouncement,criticism,insult,sarcasm,negative evaluative expression,and the self-identity highlighted through semantic components like advices,warnings,recommendations,threats and orders as well as the response moves which can communicate the rapport challenge orientation hold by complainers of online complaining about hotel.The study may benefit the handler of those online complaining,generally the manager responsible for the responses to customers' complaining.In addition,being a study of investigating rapport-threatening classifications and the corresponding linguistic manifestations,this study is hoped to complement the studies on online complaining to some extent.However,the present study still needs further investigation,because it examined only a limited number of data within an insufficient academic research experience.