Abstract

This paper examines anger expression in a corpus of 66 customer service complaints posted to the Mexican X/Twitter account of the online cab company, Uber. Specifically, building on work on emotions and (im)politeness as well as work on service-related anger episodes, it focuses on how these complainers signal their anger, and how these emotional expressions are related to rapport management orientation. Adopting a qualitative perspective, we observed complainers in this corpus expressing anger explicitly (using specific lexical choices such as profanities), implicitly (for example, asking rhetorical questions with semantic connotations of anger), or indulging in anger behaviours (threatening retaliatory behaviour). The majority of these strategies would be considered rapport challenging, however, certain more constructive, rapport enhancing strategies were also observed: for example, complainers portrayed themselves as approachable using medium specific in-group slang or provided means to open a dialogue to solve whatever problem they were complaining about.