Abstract
This study examines Jordanian graduate students' complaints posted on a Facebook closed group and directed to the representatives of Student Union at Jordan University of Science and Technology to be transferred to the officials concerned. In line with Boxer (1993b), the study considers the students' complaints to be indirect speech acts, as the addressee(s) are not the source of the offense. Using a sample of 60 institutional complaining posts, the researchers have analysed the complaints in terms of their semantic formulas, politeness functions and correlations with the gender of the complainers. The students’ complaints are classified into six semantic formulas of which the act statement element is indispensable as the complaint is stated in it. The other five formulas, ordered according to their frequency, are opener, remedy, appreciative closing, justification and others. Despite the negative affect typically involved in the complaining act, the semantic formulas identified in this study are found to signal politeness and fit into Brown and Levinson’s (1987) pool of face-saving strategies rather than face-threatening acts. Specifically, when the graduate students direct their Facebook complaints to the students' representatives, they tend to offer camaraderie with them to be encouraged to pursue the problems specified in the complainers’ posts.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- „Geh ruhig“: Die Rolle der Prosodie bei der Auflösung von Ambiguitäten
- Rassistische Sprache – Eine Untersuchung zu Strategien für das Simultandolmetschen vom Englischen ins Deutsche hinsichtlich ihrer Praktikabilität
- Neue Perspektiven für die Dolmetschwissenschaft durch systemtheoretische Modellierung
- Individualismus in der Übersetzung des Titels Things Fall Apart aus dem Deutschen ins Yoruba
- Einfluss von Kultur und Fachdenken auf offizielle Tourismus-Reports
- Stielvoll und Ideenreich
- Jordanian graduate students’ complaints on Facebook: Semantic formulas and politeness
- Legal Effects of Language Issues in Workplace Discourse: Evidence from Australia’s Fairwork Commission
- La pluralidad denominativa de la Traducción e Interpretación en los Servicios Públicos a través de Twitter y YouTube
- Rezension
- María del Mar Sánchez Ramos: Documentación digital y léxico en la traducción e interpretación en los servicios públicos (TISP). Fundamentos teóricos y prácticos. Berlin: Peter Lang (Studien zur romanischen Sprachwissenschaft und interkulturellen Kommunikation, Band 143), 2020. ISBN 978-3-631-80849-8.
- Retraction Notes
- Translation Difficulty: How to Measure and What to Measure
- Evaluation of Translation through the Proposal of Error Typology: An Explanatory Attempt
- Situatedness and Translation Training: Scaffolding Skills and Progressive Methods
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- „Geh ruhig“: Die Rolle der Prosodie bei der Auflösung von Ambiguitäten
- Rassistische Sprache – Eine Untersuchung zu Strategien für das Simultandolmetschen vom Englischen ins Deutsche hinsichtlich ihrer Praktikabilität
- Neue Perspektiven für die Dolmetschwissenschaft durch systemtheoretische Modellierung
- Individualismus in der Übersetzung des Titels Things Fall Apart aus dem Deutschen ins Yoruba
- Einfluss von Kultur und Fachdenken auf offizielle Tourismus-Reports
- Stielvoll und Ideenreich
- Jordanian graduate students’ complaints on Facebook: Semantic formulas and politeness
- Legal Effects of Language Issues in Workplace Discourse: Evidence from Australia’s Fairwork Commission
- La pluralidad denominativa de la Traducción e Interpretación en los Servicios Públicos a través de Twitter y YouTube
- Rezension
- María del Mar Sánchez Ramos: Documentación digital y léxico en la traducción e interpretación en los servicios públicos (TISP). Fundamentos teóricos y prácticos. Berlin: Peter Lang (Studien zur romanischen Sprachwissenschaft und interkulturellen Kommunikation, Band 143), 2020. ISBN 978-3-631-80849-8.
- Retraction Notes
- Translation Difficulty: How to Measure and What to Measure
- Evaluation of Translation through the Proposal of Error Typology: An Explanatory Attempt
- Situatedness and Translation Training: Scaffolding Skills and Progressive Methods