When Egos Collide: The Linguistics of Aggressiveness in English, German, and Hungarian Business Letters – A Contrastive Approach

Abstract The subject of verbal aggressiveness seems to be marginalized in the context of business correspondence. Our paper sets out to fill in this niche, as it exposes the linguistic patterns of this phenomenon within business letters. The study commences with a conceptual framework within which the most relevant theoretical findings applicable to business correspondence in general and to verbal aggressiveness in particular are foregrounded. Next, through a descriptive approach, it presents a series of linguistic markers to identify the morphological, syntactic, and semantic constructions for the expression of aggressiveness. For this purpose, the article scrutinizes authentic business letters in English, German, and Hungarian, and then it juxtaposes data contrastively to conclude that offensive emotions materialize in relatively similar linguistic structures in these languages, i.e. through verbs and modal verbs of obligation, necessity, and impossibility, verbs in the first-person singular, conditional and result clauses, and time adverbials. Furthermore, given the linguistic characteristics of the aforementioned languages, business letters also exploit specific tools, such as inversion, fronting, and the emphatic “do”, to communicate hostile and threatening messages. Due to the large variety of linguistic resources provided, we deem that verbal aggressiveness alters, reshapes, and enriches the business discourse. It therefore deserves a proper place in the rhetoric of business correspondence.