Complaint Strategies Used by Jordanians: A Discourse-Pragmatic Analysis of Facebook Hotel Reviews

This study aims at investigating the impoliteness and complaint strategies used by Jordanians in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) context of Facebook hotel Arabic-written reviews. It also aims to analyse how the complaint speech act is influenced by the reviewers’ cultural background in general and their perception of impoliteness, directness, power relation and the concept of face in particular. The corpus of the study comprises 52 reviews written in Arabic, which are taken from the Facebook platform. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used in analysing the data. Accordingly, the impoliteness strategies and sub-strategies found in previous research establish the taxonomy of this study. The data analysis reveals that the reviewers prefer to use positive impoliteness (44.62%), negative impoliteness (27.50%), bald on record (18.72%), and sarcasm or mock politeness (9.16%), respectively. At the sub-strategies level, seeking disagreement, frightening others, and using inappropriate identity markers are the top three strategies in the reviewers’ corpus. Moreover, the reviewers use some strategies that can be perceived as face-threatening acts. Finally, the study concludes with a number of limitations and suggestions for further research.