Aggressive humour as a means of voicing customer dissatisfaction and creating in-group identity

Linguistic (in)directness in twitter complaints: A contrastive analysis of railway complaint interactions

“…There is far more input from responding customers in the SNCF corpus (see Table1: 7 vs 95 responding customers). In the SNCF responding customers' tweets, the focus is on sharing similar negative experiences This ties in with observations made inDayter and Rüdiger (2014),Vásquez (2016),Orthaber (2019): complainers tend to refer to other people's feedback to corroborate their own and in this way create a sense of community. Negative emotions are also enhanced by making an additional complaint.…”

Aggressive complaining on Social Media: The case of #MuckyMerton

“…Here, the target is not addressed directly but is rather depicted as a 'public spectacle'. The deployment of humour in complaints increases their shareability and the possibility that they will reach a wider audience (see also Orthaber, 2019).…”

Discursive approaches to webcare: A closer look at apologies, conversational human voice, legitimation, and emotion regulation

“…To be clear, the contributions in this special issue are by far not the first ones to address this topic from the perspective of linguistics and discourse studies. A considerable number of studies have already been carried out focusing on discourse and language use in online service contexts (e.g., Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos 2019;Cenni and Goethals 2017;Creelman 2015;Georgopoulou and Spilloti 2015;Page 2014;Page et al 2014;Vásquez 2011;Zhang and Vásquez 2014;Depraetere et al 2020;Ho 2017;Orthaber 2019;Lillqvist et al 2016), with some of them combining rigorous linguistic analysis with a subsequent experiment to test the effectiveness of specific linguistic strategies (De Clerck et al 2019;Decock, De Clerck and Van Herck 2020;Fuoli et al 2020;Van Herck, Decock, De Clerck and Hudders 2021). What makes this special issue unique is that it presents -to the best of our knowledge -the first collection of articles focusing on this topic in a discourse-oriented journal.…”