A contrastive rhetoric study of letters of complaint to editors in Philippine English and Singaporean English

• Main Author: Ranosa-Madrunio, Marilu B.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2003
• Subjects: English language > Rhetoric > Study and teaching > Philippines; Written communication; Grammar, Comparative and general; Applied Linguistics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/8; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1007/viewcontent/CDTG003570_P__1_.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

The study examines the organizational moves present in letters of complaint to editors in Philippine English and Singaporean English. It describes the grammatical-lexical and syntactic features of the complaint letters, the speech act verbs, and commonly recurring phrases. In addition, the significant differences between Philippine and Singaporean complaint letters in terms of certain adjectives used to describe these letters are also analyzed by employing a group of Filipino raters. The corpus of the body consisted of 40 complaint letters from the Philippine Daily Inquirer and another 40 from The Straits Times, newspapers of largest circulation in the Philippines and Singapore, respectively. These letters were collected over a period of 12 weeks from July to September 2002. Statistical tools used were the ANOVA, the t-test and the F-test. Findings showed that both Philippine and Singaporean samples employed the same number of moves: introduction, background, complaint, request for redress, suggestion, justification for suggestion and conclusion. No significant differences were found in the frequency of occurrence of these moves except for introduction. However, a significant difference was found between the two samples as regards length of letters. With regard to grammatical and lexical features, differences were not found in the occurrence or personal reference, modals, attitudinal objectives and adverbs. Differences were not also found in the use of syntactic features, such as interrogatives and passives, and with speech act verbs such as the IFIDs/addresses of complaints and AIPs. With respect to commonly recurring phrases, three structures were found to be common in both samples: I/We believe. I/We urge and I/We hope phrases. Finally, in terms of the description of the complaint letters, no significant differences were found between the two sets of samples as assessed by a group of Filipino raters. In view of these findings, the researcher concluded that not much of cross-cultural variation in the rhetorical conventions of writing could be observed between Filipino and Singaporean writers. It seems possible that since Filipinos and Singaporeans have engaged themselves in the use of written discourse features in English for an extensive period of time, they, too, have been immersed in the use of written discourse features in English that respondents could no longer detect the disparity in their use of the language. Moreover, directness is indeed a characteristic of Philippine and Singaporean complaint letters and is reflected in the use of linguistic features. However, the level of directness manifested in complaint letters is deeply embedded in culture such that a countrys values need to be carefully examined to find out the extent or degree of directness as well as the contexts in which this directness value may be analyzed. This is because each culture has a distinct set of experiences and conceptions unique only to it.