Victoria Wilson

The Dream of a House of My Own or My Life Turned into a Nightmare: Complaint Letters in an Institutional Context Victoria Wilson

The present work has as its object the study of the complaint in the context of letters of customers of a company in the field of civil architecture. It involves an interaction between an individual and an organization and a damage not only of a material nature, but also of a symbolic one. Assuming that complaint has an expressive nature that implies negative feelings, we investigate how the proprietor of a Brazilian middle class real estate manages these feelings. We presuppose that the achievement of a complaint is related to linguistic, discursive, contextual and sociocultural knowledges that will influence the decisions of the complainer on the best way of presenting the complaint, considering the face works and the expression of affect. In accordance with the regularities presented in the material we worked with, the strong hypothesis relies on the affective or expressive nature of complaints, considering how these customers that belong to the middle class real state, in the condition of complainers, manage the negative feelings that emerge from this kind of context in a culture known by the ?myth of cordiality?.