Article published In:
Pragmatics and SocietyVol. 12:3 (2021) ► pp.488–504
Hedged Turkish complaints and requests in the Problem-Solution text pattern
This study investigates to what extent Turkish formal complaint letters followed the ‘Problem-Solution Pattern’ (Hoey 1983), and on how the writers expressed their wishes when they explained their problem and asked the authorities to amend a mistake. The study is based on a corpus of 134 Turkish complaint letters. It draws upon Flowerdew’s (2008, 2012) approach to the problem-solution pattern and the role of clause relations in this text pattern.
Results showed that age-old Turkish rhetorical norms led writers’ choice of lexico-grammatical patterns in reflecting politeness in order to maintain their own and the recipients’ faces. The speech acts (complaint and request) in the ‘Problem and Solution’ parts below were hedged and impersonalized. The Turkish traditional rhetorical formula that was used in the request does not explicitly ask the reader to do something; in this way, the writers attempt to protect both their own face and that of the reader.
Keywords: Turkish, problem-solution pattern, face, speech acts, complaints, hedging, formulaic language
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A request and a complaint forming a speech act set
- 2.1Hedges
- 3.The study
- 3.1Data analysis
- 3.2Results of the analysis
- 3.2.1The situation part is where writers typically introduce themselves
- 3.2.2The use of passive and impersonalized forms in the Problem part
- 3.2.3Request in the Solution part
- 4.Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References
References
Akar, Didar
2002 “The
macro contextual factors shaping business discourse: The Turkish case.” International Research
in Applied
Linguistics 401: 305–322. 
Akbaş, Erdem
2014 Commitment-detachment
and authorial presence in postgraduate academic writing: A comparative study of Turkish native
speakers. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. University of York, UK.
Baker, Paul
2006 Using
Corpora in Discourse
Analysis. London: Continuum.
Baratta, Alexander M.
2009 “Revealing stance through
passive voice.” Journal of
Pragmatics 411:10406–1421.
Bhatia, Vijay K., John Flowerdew, and Rodney H. Jones
2008 “Approaches
to discourse analysis.” In Advances in Discourse
Studies, ed. by Vijay K. Bhatia, John Flowerdew, and Rodney H. Jones, 1–18. London: Routledge.
Biber, Douglas, Ulla Connor and Thomas Upton
2007 “Discourse
Analysis and Corpus Linguistics.” In Discourse on the Move: Using
corpus analysis to describe discourse structure (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Vol.
28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1989 “Playing
it safe: The role of conventionality in
indirectness.” In Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and
Apologies, ed. by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliana House, and Gabriele Kasper, 37–70. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
1987 “Indirectness
and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of
Pragmatics 111:131–146.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness:
Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, Andrew D. and Elite Olshtain
1993 “The
production of speech acts by EFL learners.” TESOL
Quarterly 27(1):33–56.
Crompton, Peter
1997 “Hedging
in academic writing: some theoretical problems.” English for Specific
Purposes 16(4): 271–287.
Doyuran, Zeynep
2009 “Conciliation
of knowledge through hedging in Turkish scientific articles.” Hacettepe University Journal of
the Faculty of
Letters 26(1): 85–99.
Duruk, Eda
2017 “Analysis
of metadiscourse markers in academic written discourse produced by Turkish
researchers.” Journal of Language and Linguistic
Studies 13(1):1–19.
Emeksiz, Zeynep E.
2015 “Stance taking and passive voice
in Turkish academic discourse.” Journal of Language and Linguistic
Studies 11(2), 13–22.
Flowerdew, Lynne
2012 “Exploiting
a corpus of business letters from a phraseological, functional
perspective.” ReCALL 241:152–168.
Goffman, Erwin
1959 The
Presentation of Self in Daily Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
1967 “On
Face-Work” In Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face
Behaviour, ed. by Erwin Goffman, 5–45. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Göksel, Aslı and Celia Kerslake
2005 Turkish:
A comprehensive
grammar. London: Routledge.
Gu, Yueguo
1990 “Politeness
phenomena in Modern Chinese.” Journal of
Pragmatics 141: 237–257.
Hartford, Beverly and Ahmar Mahboob
2004 “Models
of Discourse in the letter of complaint.” World
Englishes 23(4): 585–600.
Hinkel, Eli
2005 “Hedging,
inflating, and persuading in L2 academic writing.” Applied Language
Learning 15(1&2): 29–53.
Ho, Victor
2011 “What
functions do intertextuality and interdiscursivity serve in request email discourse?” Journal
of Pragmatics 431: 2534–2547.
Hoey, Michael
1983 On
the Surface of Discourse. London: Allen & Unwin.
Hyland, Ken
1996 “Writing
without conviction? Hedging in scientific research articles.” Applied
Linguistics 17(4):433–454.
1998 “Boosting
hedging and the meaning of academic
knowledge.” Text 18(3):349–382.
Karatepe, Çiğdem
2016 “Indirectness
in requests in complaint letters to the higher institution by Turkish EFL Students.” Procedia –
Social and Behavioral
Sciences 2321: 354–361.
Jenkins, Susan and John Hinds
1987 “Business
letter writing: English, French and Japanese.” TESOL
Quarterly 1(2): 327–349.
Kerslake, Celia
1996 “
The
semantics of possibility of Turkish
.” In Current Issues
in Turkish Linguistics: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Turkish
Linguistics (pp. 84–104). Ankara: Hitit Yayınları.
Lakoff, George
1975 “Hedges:
A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts.” Chicago Linguistic Society
Papers 81: 183–228.
Mackiewicz, Jo and Kathryn Riley
2003 “The
technical editor as diplomat: Linguistic strategies for balancing clarity and
politeness.” Technical
Communication 50(1): 83–94.
Maier, Paula
1992 “Politeness
strategies in business letters by native and non-native English speakers.” English for Specific
Purposes 111:189–205.
Molino, Alessandra
2010 “Personal
and impersonal authorial references: A contrastive study of English and Italian Linguistics research
articles.” Journal of English for Academic
Purposes 91: 86–101.
Murphy, Beth and Joyce Neu
1996 “ ‘My
grade is too low’: The speech act set of complaining.” In Speech Acts
Across Cultures, ed. by Susan Gass and Joyce Neu, 191–216. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Myers, Greg
1989 “The
pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles.” Applied
Linguistics 10(1):1–35.
Olshtain, Elite and Liora Weinbach
1993 “Interlanguage
features of the speech act of complaining”. In Interlanguage
Pragmatics, ed. by Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka. 108–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reilly, Judy, Anita Zamora, and Robert F. McGivern
2005 “Acquiring
perspective in English: The development of stance.” Journal of
Pragmatics 37(2): 185–208.
Reiter, Rosina Marquez, Isobel Rainey and Glenn Fulcher
2005 “A
comparative study of certainty and conventional indirectness: Evidence from British English and Peninsular
Spanish.” Applied
Linguistics 26(1):1–31.
Salager-Meyer, Françoise
1997 “I
think that perhaps you should: A study of hedges in written scientific
discourse.” In Functional Approaches to Written Text: Classroom
applications, ed. by Tom Miller, 105–118. Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency, English Language Programmes.
Searle, John R.
1977 “Indirect speech
acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, Speech
Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press.
Varttala, Teppo
1999 “Remarks
on the communicative functions of hedging in popular scientific and research articles on
medicine.” English for Specific
Purposes 18(2):177–200.
Vergaro, Carla
2002 “ ‘Dear
Sirs, what would you do if you were in our position?’ Discourse Strategies in Italian and English Money Chasing
Letters.” Journal of
Pragmatics 241: 1211–1232.
Wood, David
2015 Fundamentals
of Formulaic Language: An
introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Yeung, Lorrita N. T.
1997 “Polite requests in English
and Chinese business correspondence in Hong Kong.” Journal of
Pragmatics 27(4): 505–522.