A Discourse Analysis of Complaint Letters Written by Native Speakers

Due to the major political and economical changes in the world, international relations have expanded significantly, and English is widely recognized as a global language by many countries. Hence, in order to succeed in international relations, the non-native writers should be proficient in using English in different types of discourses including their letter writings. The purpose of this study was to analyze features of complaint letters written by native English speakers and explore the politeness strategies of those letters which learners of English may fail using appropriately. For this purpose, thirty authentic letters were chosen from the book “How to write better letters” edited by Chappell (۲۰۰۶). Through Halliday’s notion of lexical density, Cook’s expressed features of genre identification and Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness strategies, the collected data were analyzed. The analysis of the results showed that the native complaint letter writers mostly relied on ‘personal references’, ‘conjunction cohesion’, ‘repetition’, ‘substitution cohesion’, and ‘indirect negative politeness strategies’ in their writings. Language teachers and syllabus designers can use these results to make the foreign learners of English learn about social aspects of language and direct them to use the pragmatic elements in their letters.

کلیدواژه ها:

Complaint letters ، discourse analysis ، native speakers