Handling customers complaints by email

Nowadays, email messages are probably the most common medium used in international business. Many researchers have studied them from diverse standpoints. Our paper shows some research in-progress based on a corpus of complaint/apology emails from a Spanish car rental company. We show an initial analysis of some examples of our corpus, trying to find out the characteristic moves and describing the main language features found when exchanging complaints and apologies. We also point out some pedagogical implications related to the teaching of business pragmatics.