The act of complaining in Brunei—Then and now

This paper sets out to investigate the English complaint speech act in Brunei Darussalam, a country in South East Asia where English is the second language. Based on a corpus of letters of complaint written by Bruneian English speakers to the then only English medium newspaper in the country the Borneo Bulletin over a 17-year period from 1988 to 2005, the paper attempts to (i) make explicit the move structure of the public complaint speech act; (ii) ascertain the degree of politeness in such complaints, particularly of a personal nature and (iii) compare changes, if any, in the politeness of these public complaints over a 17-year period. In addition to using the Swalesian move analysis, a two-level directness scale-modality marker model was also utilised to determine the degree of politeness in the letters of complaint. The results show that this genre has changed markedly over the period under investigation. The act of complaining has metamorphosized from one that was indiscriminately direct and aggressive to one that is direct but diplomatic and polite.