NGHIÊN CỨU SO SÁNH NGÔN NGỮ BIỂU ĐẠT NỘI DUNG VÀ MỤC ĐÍCH PHÀN NÀN CỦA NGƯỜI TIÊU DÙNG TRÊN SÀN THƯƠNG MẠI ĐIỆN TỬ VIỆT NAM VÀ NHẬT BẢN

Abstract

This study investigates 744 complaint utterances in Vietnamese and Japanese online reviews on e-commerce platforms, including 384 Vietnamese and 360 Japanese utterances, with a focus on household products. The study aims to identify the major complaint contents and communicative purposes, while also describing the expressions used to realize these contents and purposes in the two datasets. Based on qualitative analysis combined with descriptive statistics, the findings show that product quality is the most prominent complaint content in both datasets, while emotional release is the dominant communicative purpose. However, similarity in content and purpose does not imply similarity in linguistic realization. The Vietnamese data tend to employ direct, concise, and highly emotional expressions. In contrast, the Japanese data more often rely on expressions contrasting expectation with actual experience, indicating deviation from expected standards, and expressing disappointment in a more mitigated way. These findings contribute to clarifying the characteristics of complaint speech acts in digital communication from a Vietnamese - Japanese contrastive pragmatic perspective.