Specific features of written institutional complaints in British linguistic culture

The research aims to identify the specific characteristics of written institutional complaints within British linguistic culture, in order to determine culturally significant communication parameters and conventional linguistic strategies essential for successfully achieving communicative goals in this language context. This article examines the structure of institutional complaints and the substantive content of a specific structural component: “Address to the Authorized Person”. This section typically contains a direct or indirect directive (inducement) for the addressee to take action to rectify the negative situation that prompted the institutional complaint. The article analyzes the content of this section and the most frequent linguistic means used to express directive illocutionary force. Furthermore, we analyze this component regarding the presence of threats and the sender’s deployment of mitigating strategies. The scientific novelty of this research lies in its detailed description of the most frequent linguistic methods for realizing directives and the linguo-pragmatic mechanisms employed to achieve a specific pragmatic goal when addressing an authorized person in a written institutional complaint within British linguistic culture. This research approach will facilitate a closer examination of the speech act of complaining within a pragmatic context, leading to a better understanding of the communicators’ linguo-cultural characteristics. The study revealed that, in the majority of cases within our letter corpus, indirect methods were employed to prompt the addressee to act. In nearly half of the letters, senders utilized both threats and mitigating strategies in roughly equal proportion to strengthen their position. An analysis of the frequency of addressee-prompting methods reveals the pragmatics of language, mechanisms of persuasion, socio-cultural norms, and cognitive processes in communication, demonstrating how language is used for targeted influence and shapes social reality.