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Article published In:
(Inter)Cultural Dialogues
Edited by Răzvan Săftoiu
[Language and Dialogue 13:3] 2023
► pp. 336–363

The realization of the speech acts of complaint and responding to complaint in Vodafone Egypt versus Vodafone UK

A cross-cultural pragmatic study

| Prince Sultan University
| Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport
The current study aims to compare the complaints/responses to complaints on the Facebook pages of Vodafone UK versus Vodafone Egypt. 200 complaints and 200 responses to these complaints were collected from the Facebook pages of the two companies in September 2022. The analysis results showed that the UK customers produced significantly more expressions of disapproval, particularly ill consequences and annoyance, than their Egyptian counterparts. The Egyptian customers produced significantly more blame and requests than the UK customers. In terms of responses to complaints, the UK responses were dominated by acceptance strategies, particularly in the form of offers of repair, while the Egyptian responses came mainly in the form of partial acceptance, particularly in the form of seeking further information.
Keywords: complaint, speech act, cross-cultural pragmatics, Mixed Game Model (MGM)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Literature review
    • 3.1Monolingual studies on complaints/response to complaints
    • 3.2Cross-cultural studies on complaints/response to complaints
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Data collection
    • 5.2Data coding
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Are there significant differences between the complaint strategies of Vodafone UK and Vodafone Egypt?
    • 6.2Are there significant differences between the complaint-response strategies of Vodafone UK and Vodafone Egypt?
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00157.dak
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