Speech Acts Bibliography:
Complaints

Arent, R. (1996). Sociopragmatic decisions regarding complaints by Chinese learners and NSs of American English. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1 (1), 125-147.

An exploratory study that compares the relative frequency of the performance and avoidance of oral complaints by 22 Chinese learners and 12 native speakers of American English. Respondents asked to respond to three problematic situations that were set in the same university housing complex. Audiotaped roleplays, interview data on perceived situational seriousness, and verbal report data were obtained. Respondents were allowed to opt out, and effects of social distance, power, and type of social contract controlled for. Found that sociopragmatic decision making for Chinese learners and NSs of American English appears to be associated with individual perceptions of situational seriousness and with culturally-conditioned perceptions of the flexibility of explicit social contracts. In the car being towed situation, the Chinese learners saw it as more serious than the Americans did. The numerous limitations of the study are listed (138).

Bolívar, A. (2002). Los reclamos como actos de habla en el español de Venezuela. In Placencia, M. E. & Bravo, D. (Eds.), Actos de habla y cortesía en español (pp. 37-53). Munich, Germany: LINCOM Europa.

This study analyzes different complaint strategies used in Venezuelan Spanish in two different contexts (private and public arena). Fifty Venezuelan university females, ages 18-25, were surveyed utilizing a discourse completion task. Their responses were analyzed and classified into 3 types of strategies (alerters, directives, and evaluators). The results reveal the influence that social factors (i.e., distance, power, social arena) have on strategy choice. In the private sector complaint (breaking a promise to a friend), the most commonly used strategy was warning (No vuelvo a prestarte mi carro), followed by a personal complaint (Tú eres irresponsable). There were no instances of request for repair. However, in the public complaint (a stranger's dog defecating on the lawn), a request for repair (Hágame el favor y lo limpia) was the most common strategy. Other strategies used in this situation include alerters (disculpa señora) and moral instruction (Educa un poco mejor a tu perro). Detailed examples of the various uses of these strategies are given.

Boxer, D. (1993a). Complaining and commiserating: A speech act view of solidarity in spoken American English. NY: Peter Lang.

Studies 295 interlocutors, producing 533 indirect complaints. An indirect complaint is defined as a negative evaluation wherein the addressee is not held responsible for the perceived offense (i.e., griping); the expression of dissatisfaction to an interlocutor about a speaker himself/herself or someone/something that is not present. ICs are frequently employed in an attempt to establish rapport or solidarity between interlocutors (pp. 2-3). Ch. 2 describes 3 types of IC themes (personal, impersonal, other -- trivial) followed by 6 types of IC responses (nothing or topic switch, question, contradiction, joke/teasing, advice/lecture, commiseration). Then the chapter analyzes supportive and neutral exchanges. Ch. 3 (71 ff) deals with gender, social status, social distance, and theme. Ch. 4 relates ICs to the norms of the community. Half of interlocutors were Jewish (Boxer's circle of friends), so possible to investigate ethnicity. Nine out of 10 strongly agreed that Jews complain more -- part of ethnicity (pp. 133-137). Ch. 5 focuses on what the learner needs to know about complaining and commiserating (147-166). E.g., NNSs need to know that commiserating with complaints is important -- being supportive. This builds solidarity. Ch. 6 gives the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study. For example with respect to gender, women mostly commiserated with ICs, while men contradicted or gave advice. Points out that ESL textbooks do not include ICs or include them but don't treat them as ICs.

Boxer, D. (1993b). Complaints as positive strategies: What the learner needs to know. TESOL Quarterly, 27 (2), 277-299.

Studies indirect complaint + commiseration (griping) in conversations between Japanese learners of English as an L2 and their E1 peers. An indirect complaint is defined as the expression of dissatisfaction about oneself or someone/something that is not present. The addressee is neither held responsible nor capable of remedying the perceived offense. Natives use indirect complaints as a positive strategy for establishing points of commonality. Researcher used spontaneous speech or field notes. 295 interlocutors were recorded in spontaneous conversation (195 women and 100 men). The issue that emerged was that of how to respond to an indirect complaint. Natives used joking/teasing, nonsubstantive reply ("hmn"), question, advice/lecture, contradiction, and commiseration. With NSs most responses were commiseration with some questioning. For NNSs, the major category was nonsubstantive, then with some questioning and some commiseration. The author suggests that the Japanese ESL learners are missing out on opportunities for conversation by not engaging in the interaction more fully -- utilizing talk more the way NSs do.

Boxer, D. (1996). Ethnographic interviewing as a research tool in speech act analysis: The case of complaints. In S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language (pp. 217-239). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reports on baseline findings on rules for the realization and underlying social strategies of a specific speech act set sequence. She endorses ethnographic interviewing as a way of tapping the norms of the communities both in research on speech act usage among native speakers in particular languages and research on non-native speaker pragmatic transfer. In this chapter, she discussed the results of 2 sets of interviews, one of which was structured and one of which was open-ended, which were designed to evaluate "troubles-telling" (indirect complaining designed for sharing mutual sentiment) in a group of native speakers. Her goal in the studies was to tap not only sociolinguistic knowledge that was explicit, but knowledge that was tacit in the "naive" respondents. There were ten informants who were students, staff, faculty members, or alumni at a large university in the northeastern U.S., all of Jewish background. [It appears that the subjects were the same for both interview sets, but Boxer interwove information in such a way that it was difficult to follow exactly what pertained to what interview process.] The spontaneous speech data consisted of 533 troubles-telling exchanges that were tape recorded or recorded in field notes. Six major categories of responses emerged as ways in which this speech community responded to indirect complaints: 1) response or topic switch, 2) questions, 3) contradiction, 4) joke/teasing, 5) advice/lecture, and 6) agreement/commiseration (a category which made up almost half the responses).

Boxer found that troubles-telling in this community was not so much negative as positive in nature, in that it was used to further conversation, build relationships, and establish solidarity. But Boxer also found that using the same questions with each of the subjects, as was done with the structured interview, was not the best idea because it inherently limited the depth of the subjects' responses. In the second (open-ended) interview, Boxer used a more open format, which allowed for expansion of ideas and greater flexibility of responses. It was easier to obtain more information about the assumptions and perceptions, which shaped the respondents' answers and ideas about troubles sharing. Boxer described the factors that made for a more ideal ethnographic interview, such as rapport with the subjects, having subjects who feel comfortable doing much of the talking, and following the lead of the subjects' narratives, rather than using preconceived questions formulated by the interviewer. Her findings revealed that in terms of troubles sharing, most respondents felt that while direct complaints qualify as "complaints," indirect complaints were not seen so much as complaining but rather a positive way of sharing mutual information and building relationships. Boxer found that more women participated in troubles-talk than men and were recipients of more indirect complaints because they were seen as "more supportive in general than men." While the explicit assumption about complaining was that it constitutes negative speech behavior, tacit assumptions proved otherwise.

Cohen, A. D. & Olshtain, E. (1993). The production of speech acts by EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 27 (1), 33-56.

Reports on a study describing ways in which nonnative speakers assessed, planned, and then delivered speech acts. The subjects, fifteen advanced English foreign language learners, were given six speech act situations (two apologies, two complaints, and two requests) in which they were to role-play along with a native speaker. The interactions were videotaped and after each set of two situations of the same type, the videotape was played back and then the respondents were asked both fixed and probing questions regarding the factors contributing to the production of their responses in those situations. The retrospective verbal report protocols were analyzed with regard to processing strategies in speech act formulation. The study found that in delivering the speech acts, half of the time respondents conducted only a general assessment of the utterances called for in the situation without planning specific vocabulary and grammatical structures, often thought in two languages and sometimes in three languages (if trilingual), utilized a series of different strategies in searching for language forms, and did not attend much to grammar nor to pronunciation. Finally, there were respondents whose speech production styles characterized them as "metacognizers," "avoiders," and "pragmatists" respectively.

Du, J. S. (1995). Performance of face-threatening acts in Chinese: Complaining, giving bad news, and disagreeing. In G. Kasper (Ed.), Pragmatics of Chinese as a native and target language (pp. 165-206). Manoa, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press.

Gives a definition of three face-threatening acts, complaining, giving bad news, and disagreeing, and discusses the illocutionary verbs which denote these acts and the semantics of face in Chinese culture. According to Du, in Chinese culture face is socially oriented and reciprocal, and as such requires some method of maintaining "face balance." The act of giving bad news may in some cases be face-saving, depending on the relationship between the interlocutors and the nature of the message. However, complaining (which indicates that the person's behavior is not approved or accepted by other social members) and disagreeing (which indicates a contradiction or negative evaluation of a person's face) are in most cases, clearly face-threatening. Therefore these acts require some strategy for preserving the lian/mianzi (face) of both interlocutors. Du conducted a study with thirty students (male and female) from Beijing Normal University ranging from 19 to 30 years old. Du explored the three speech acts listed above using a 19-item questionnaire that described face-threatening situations and asked each subject to contemplate the situation and write his/her response. The results showed that strategy choice varied according to the referential goal and the nature of the interlocutor relationship, but a general pattern could be noted: face-threatening acts in Chinese tend to be performed "in a cooperative rather than confrontational manner. By emphasizing common ground and constructive problem solutions, attention is paid to both participants' lian and mianzi."

Frescura, M. A. (1993). A sociolinguistic comparison of "reactions to complaints": Italian L1 vs. English L1, Italian L2, and Italian as a community language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Graduate Department of Education, University of Toronto, Toronto.

Discusses role-play data on reactions to complaints (mostly apologies) that were tape-recorded from native Italian speakers in Italy, native English speakers in Canada, Italians residing in Canada, and English-Canadian learners of Italian (N=83). After being tape-recorded in six role-play interactions, the respondents were asked to listen to all six recordings and to provide retrospective verbal report on (a) how close to real life they felt their performance to be, (b) how dominant they felt their interlocutor was, (c) their sensitivity to the severity of the offense and to the tone of the complaint, and (for Italians in Canada and learners of Italian) (d) their possible linguistic difficulties. The data were coded according to a taxonomy comprising seven semantic formulas in two categories: hearer-supportive (including formulas providing gratification and support for the "face" of the complainers) and self-supportive (including formulas uttered by the speakers to defend and protect their own "face"). Performance was measured according to the three dimensions of production (total output of formulas, including repetitions), selection (types of formulas used, excluding repetitions), and intensity of formulas produced. Native speakers of Italian had an overall preference for the self-supportive category of formulas, while native speakers of English had a preference for the hearer-supportive category. Learners of Italian did not indicate any preference, while Italian-Canadian speakers, though diverging some from the native norm, gave indication of language maintenance as well. Frescura's use of verbal report helped her establish, among other things, that the learners of Italian tended to think in English first before responding to the role plays.

The author defined complaint conversations as conversations that involve two parties with distinct communicative orientations, the complainer and the complainee. She asserted that complaint conversations are distinguished from quarrels in that the former involves an effort by the complainee to minimize the confrontation while with the latter, the two confront each other on a par. In the chapter Kumagai focused on two complaint conversations and discussed how the repetition of utterances within such conversations functions as a conversational strategy to 1) express emotions (complainer expresses negative feelings and disapproval, complainee regret and disagreement), 2) deal with the complaint situation effectively as a complainer or complainee (complainer: intensification of reproach, maintaining stance by adding utterances, sarcasm using complainee’s words; complainee: repeating apologies, stalling/diverting the complaint), 3) provide rhetoric for argument (complainer: holding the floor by speaking fluently and adding utterances, controlling the topic of the complaint; complainee: reorienting the conversation to a solution, closing the conversation), and 4) manipulate the conversational development. In particular the author focused on uses of repetition, both exact repetition as well as modified repetition or paraphrase, of utterances made earlier in the same conversation. She supported Tannen’s (1989) claim that repetition is a major means for creating speaker involvement and not merely a matter of redundancy. She took the two conversations from a corpus she collected earlier (1991-2). In the first conversation the complainer was a male shopkeeper in downtown Tokyo and the complainee a male university student attempting to conduct a survey. The complainee’s mother and wife also participated in an effort to keep the peace when the shopkeeper returned to the shop to find the student there after he had told him he could not do his survey there. In the second conversation, one teenage girl was accusing the other of being later for their appointment.

The study analyzed pragmatic strategies used by Uruguayan (Montevidean) custormers and service representatives during complaint calls to a caregiver company. More specifically, it explored aspects of the interactional behavior by analyzing the pragmatic strategies adopted by callers in constructing their complaints and those by call-takers in responding to them with special attention to the expression of ‘desahogo’ – a self disclosure pragmatic strategy used by callers when they realized that they had been unsuccessful in obtaining their main transactional goal. Data presented in this study was based on 15 telephone conversations recorded in 2002 by one of the largest companies in Uruguay. The median call length was nine minutes. Results indicated that the pragmatic strategies reflected the Uruguayan socio-cultural reality in which venting to a complete stranger appeared to be a socially accepted behavior. Also, the author noted that these strategies reflected the country’s lagging provision of consumers’ rights. Thus, in the context of desahogo in complaints, it functioned as a verbal avenue through which interlocutors expressed their frustration about the service received, even if remedial action was unlikely to occur. The author pointed out that in the study context desahogo was explained by: “1) a shared cultural understanding of the type and amount of personal information considered to be appropriate and/or inappropriate to disclose in task-oriented interactions with complete strangers; and 2) Uruguay’s developing socio-economic infrastructure, which does not yet fully safeguard consumers’ rights.”

Morrow, C. K. (1995). The pragmatic effects of instruction on ESL learners' production of complaint and refusal speech acts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of New York at Buffalo, Amherst, NY. UMI Microform, UMI Number: 9603629.

Studies 20 students enrolled in two spoken English classes in an intensive ESL program in the U.S. A 3_ hour intervention using model dialogues, prescribed speech-act formulae, and various types of performance activities (games and role playing) about refusals and complaints was used. Oral data were collected prior to, following, and six months after the intervention by means of seven semi-structured role-play tasks which prompted subjects to perform three direct complaints and four refusals with peer interlocutors. The data were analyzed using: a) holistic ratings of clarity and politeness, and b) comparisons of the pretest and posttest distributions of discourse features with those of native English speaking controls (N=14). T-tests comparing the pooled pretest and posttest holistic scores revealed improvements in subjects' levels of clarity and politeness which were significant at p<.0005. Similar comparisons of the posttest and delayed posttest scores did not attain statistical significance. The refusal analysis of discourse features (semantic formulae) revealed increases in the use of politeness strategies, especially of negative politeness strategies. Frequently these developmental changes appeared pragmatically appropriate even when they failed to converge toward the native speaker frequencies. Analysis of propositions and modifiers in the complaint data revealed gains in pragmatic competence which were indicated by such changes as increased indirectness, more complete explanations, and fewer explicit statements of dissatisfaction. These results, which corroborated the findings from the holistic ratings, suggested that speech act instruction helped the subjects to perform complaints and refusals which were clearer, more polite, and, to a limited extent, more native-like. Additional intra-task comparisons found that higher levels of pragmatic competence were achieved when the interlocutor's level of social distance was lower (i.e., friends as opposed to acquaintances).

Murphy, B. &. Neu, J. (1996). My grade's too low: The speech act set of complaining. In S. M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in second language (pp. 191-216). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer.

Begins by providing a background about communicative competence and an overview of some of the issues covered in research on speech act production and speech act acceptability judgments. (They cited the work of Austin, Searle, Manes, Wolfson, D'Amico-Reisner, & Huber, Cohen & Olshtain, van Dijk, and Ferrara.) The authors then described their own study which had two objectives: 1) to compare components of the speech act set (of complaining) produced by U.S. American native speakers and Korean non-native speakers of English, and 2) to ascertain how these speech act sets were judged by native speakers based on a number of factors (such as whether the act is aggressive, respectful, credible, appropriate, and similar to what a native would use). For the productive part of the study, the subjects were 14 male U.S. American and 14 male Korean graduate students from Penn State University. Twenty-three undergraduate and 4 graduate students (for a total of 27) participated in the receptive part of the study, judging the acceptability of the speech act sets. The speech act data were collected via an oral discourse completion task. A hypothetical situation was presented in which the subject was placed in the position of a student whose paper had been unfairly marked and the subjects were directed to "go speak to the professor." The subjects' response was recorded by tape recorder. The instrument in the acceptability judgment part of the study was a questionnaire with 10 yes-no questions and one open-ended question. Five of the yes-no questions were "distractor items" and the other 5 were designed to measure the native speakers' perceptions about the speech act acceptability. The open-ended question asked, "If you were the student in this situation, would your approach be different from the student you've just heard? Please explain you answer for both speaker-student 1 and speaker-student 2." Each subject was alone during the discourse completion task and his/her data were later transcribed into written form. The speech data elicited for the first part of the study were examined using Cohen and Olshtain's (1981) definition of speech act set. A .05 alpha level of significance was set for a Chi-square analysis of the U.S. American students' responses to the five yes-no questions (which were not distractors) and the Yate's Correction for Continuity was used to analyze all differences between responses.

The results showed that when expressing disapproval about a grade received on a paper to a professor, most U.S. American native speakers would produce a complaint speech act set, while most Korean non-native speakers (11 out of 14) would not. Both native and non-native speakers used an "explanation of purpose" to begin the speech act set in similar ways. The native speakers then produced a complaint only after the explanation of purpose. This complaint appeared to be what most of these native speakers felt was the most socially appropriate option for expressing disapproval. The act involved: acceptance of responsibility, depersonalization of the problem, questioning techniques that used modals "would" and/or "could," use of mitigators, and use of the pronoun "we." The 11 non-native speakers who did not use a complaint form employed what was perceived by native speakers as a form of criticism instead which: served to abdicate responsibility, personalized the problem (placed blame), and involved using the modal "should." This represented a serious deviation from the native speakers' speech data. Both the native and non-native speakers then used similar types of "justifications" in their speech act sets, referring to amount of time, effort, and/or work put into the paper. Finally all of the native and most (12 out of 14) of the non-native speakers included a candidate solution: a request form in the speech act set in order to propose an option that would politely remedy the situation (such as reconsidering the grade, discussing the paper, or editing the paper further for an improved grade). As a result of the "criticism" form used by the many of the Korean non-native speakers, native speakers judged the non-native speakers' speech act sets to be more aggressive, less respectful, less credible, and less appropriate than the common "complaint" speech act sets offered by native speakers.

Nakabachi, K. (1996). Pragmatic transfer in complaints: Strategies of complaining in English and Japanese by Japanese EFL speakers. JACET Bulletin, 27, 127-142.

The speech act of complaining is examined cross-linguistically -- Japanese L1 vs. EFL by Japanese speakers. The study looked at whether Japanese EFL learners changed their strategies of complaint when they spoke in English, and if so, what the factors were affecting change. The subjects were 39 undergraduates with an intermediate level of proficiency in English but no experience living in English speaking countries. A discourse completion test was used, including eight situations. It was found that almost half of the subjects changed their speech strategies in English. Over a quarter used more severe expressions than natives did. This was interpreted as over-accommodation to the target language norms, and seemed to suggest the risk involved with attempting to adapt to the local sociocultural norms.