Expresión de una "Strong Complaint" en tres formas diferentes de comunicación.

Abstract

An aim shared by the teachers of English Language in a Business School is to provide students with the appropiate communicative strategies that may enable them to interact linguistically in the business world. This paper attempts to characterise the specific linguistic performances of certain communicative activities in a business context. The study of three communicative activities: the telephone conversation, the commercial letter and the telex, expressing the function "making a strong complaint" documents the differences between them. The description of these genres suggests parameters by which discourse takes its form: formal vs. informal, polite vs. familiar and the range of patterns associated with discourse of a recognizable type. This comparative and contrastive study reflects 1.- the differences in use of repetition in these three forms of communication, 2.- the conventions to be respected in the three forms of communication, 3.- the expression of feelings, emotions, etc. mainly "anger" in the three forms of communication. Pedagogically this means that there should be a deliberate teaching of the adequate linguistic performances of the several communicative activities in the business world.