A comparison of British and Italian customer-complaint forms

Institutional and corporate writing have been widely investigated over the last two decades by applied linguists, educationalists and ESP scholars, with special attention given to business correspondence, annual reports, press releases and, more recently, email messages and other digital media. Some kinds of documents, however, still await scrutiny. This exploratory study turns to the customer-complaint form, a well-established but relatively unresearched genre that frames the reporting of critical incidents to service providers. Its structure and wording are described contrastively across a sample of texts produced by British and Italian organisations. The results highlight several differences between the two samples in terms of structure, wording of requests/instructions, and conventional indirectness. While many of these are language-driven, others may be interpreted as an expression of national perceptions of the duties and expectations of the parties involved.

• Customer-complaint forms hold interesting evidence of linguacultural variation.
• The approach in British forms is more negotial; more institutional in Italian forms.
• Directives (requests + instructions) are three times more frequent in British forms.
• In British forms the event is personalised and the complainant addressed directly.
• In Italian forms the event is objectified and the complainant concealed.