Abstract This cross-cultural study examines the differences in communicative styles between English and German email responses to customer complaints by analysing their discourse structure (through a rhetorical move analysis) and the frequency of first-person references (I and we and their different forms). The framework is given by House (House, Juliane. 2006. Communicative styles in English and German. European Journal of English Studies 10(3). 249–267.), who suggests that English speakers tend to use a more interpersonal (i.e., people-oriented) communicative style, while German speakers show a preference for a transactional (i.e., content-oriented) style. In addition, first-person references within the genre of email responses to complaints are associated with either the customer service agent’s personal or corporate identity. The data consist of 150 English and 84 German authentic emails. The results of the move analysis reveal that the discourse structure of both data sets is mainly similar, but the few differences point into the direction of support for House’s framework, in particular the dimension on addressee- or content-orientation. Although agents generally use more we than I-references in both data sets, thus exhibiting mainly a corporate identity, they tend to use the opposite in some moves (e.g., Apology), which points to pronominal shifting across move level, as suggested in previous research (Zhang, Yi & Camilla Vásquez. 2014. Hotels’ responses to online reviews: Managing consumer dissatisfaction. Discourse, Context and Media 6. 54–64.). Overall, the German agents use more we-references compared to their British colleagues. Finally, agents use pronominal shifting within move level to distance themselves from the company.

中文翻译：

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英语和德语电子邮件回复客户投诉的人与内容导向方法：移动和第一人称代词的跨文化分析

摘要 这项跨文化研究通过分析他们的话语结构（通过修辞动作分析）和第一人称参考的频率（我和我们及其不同的形式）来检验英语和德语电子邮件对客户投诉的回应在沟通风格上的差异. 该框架由 House (House, Juliane. 2006. Communicative styles in English and German. European Journal of English Studies 10(3). 249–267.) 给出，他认为讲英语的人倾向于使用更多的人际交往（即，以人为本）的交际风格，而说德语的人则偏爱事务性（即以内容为导向）的风格。此外，电子邮件回复投诉类型中的第一人称参考与客户服务代理的个人或公司身份相关联。数据包括 150 封英文和 84 封德文的真实电子邮件。移动分析的结果表明，两个数据集的语篇结构主要相似，但很少有差异指向对House框架的支持方向，特别是在收件人或内容导向方面。尽管代理通常在两个数据集中使用比 I-references 更多的 we，因此主要表现出企业身份，但他们倾向于在某些动作（例如 Apology）中使用相反的内容，这表明跨动作级别的代词转移，如前所述研究（Zhang, Yi & Camilla Vásquez。2014。酒店对在线评论的回应：管理消费者不满。话语、语境和媒体 6。54-64。）。总体而言，与他们的英国同事相比，德国特工使用了更多的我们参考。最后，