Analysis of complaining strategies on services offered to Facebook users on Zain Jordan

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the complaining strategies used by Facebook users on Zain Facebook page (Zain Jordan). It also aims to identify the most and least frequent strategies used by Facebook users and to examine the similarities and differences between complaining strategies found on Zain Jordan and those found in other studies in terms of types of strategies used and the linguistic features of the language. To this end, the researchers built a specialized corpus. The corpus was manually annotated to include pragmatic information on the types of complaining strategies used on Zain Jordan. The data were analyzed based on Olshtain and Weinbach (1993). In addition, 6 new strategies were identified by the researchers in a pilot study and were added to the adopted taxonomy. The results show that there are 10 complaining strategies used by Facebook users on Zain Jordan. The results also demonstrate that the majority of complaining strategies used on Zain Jordan were direct, which was attributed to the lack of face-to-face interaction and the anonymity provided by Facebook. Moreover, complaining strategies on Facebook have their own linguistic features, namely, using long and complex sentences (except in emojis), improper use or absence of punctuation marks, using taboo words in some strategies, using formulaic phrases, consecutive dots, informal colloquial Arabic, typos and repetition of letters. The study concludes with recommendations for further research.