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Interlanguage Features of the Speech Act of Complaining
Abstract
This is a collection of contributed, previously unpublished essays on topics in interlanguage pragmatics. ‘Pragmatics’ refers to speakers’ intended meaning, and ‘interlanguage’ is the term used to describe the linguistic knowledge of how non-native speakers (and listeners) use their deficient communicative competence in order to cope with a variety of communicative tasks. In this volume, sixteen distinguished linguists will focus on these central issues in interlanguage pragmatics: (1) non-native language users’ consciousness of their pragmatic knowledge (metapragmatic awareness), (2) their conversational behaviour in interaction with native speakers, particularly with regard to social appropriateness, topic effects, and responding acts, and (3) interlanguage realization of complaints, apologies, and thanks. The structure of conscious linguistic knowledge has become an important issue in second language acquisition research, but has received almost no attention in pragmatics. This volume will be the first comprehensive study of this important linguistic area.
... The differences in cultural values led to crosscultural misunderstandings and conflicts between these two language groups. Olshtain and Weinbach's (1993) study showed that Russian and Moroccan immigrants in Israel differently structured their complaints related to money, friendship, and parking, which reflected their respective culture-specific values. However, in another study, Olshtain and Weinbach (1993) found that American speakers, British English speakers, and Hebrew speakers employed similar strategies (warning, complaint, and disapproval) when complaining in situations that are socially unacceptable in all three cultures. ...
... Olshtain and Weinbach's (1993) study showed that Russian and Moroccan immigrants in Israel differently structured their complaints related to money, friendship, and parking, which reflected their respective culture-specific values. However, in another study, Olshtain and Weinbach (1993) found that American speakers, British English speakers, and Hebrew speakers employed similar strategies (warning, complaint, and disapproval) when complaining in situations that are socially unacceptable in all three cultures. The authors asserted that the situation itself, and not language-or culture-specific norms, was a significant factor in the strategy selection across cultures. ...
... Cross-cultural studies have also indicated that speakers across cultures differently perceive social variables of distance and power, which affects their linguistic behavior. Hebrew speakers in Olshtain and Weinbach's (1993) study opted for less severe strategies with a person of a higher status than with a person of a lower status. Similarly, native speakers of English in Trosborg's (1995) study employed more indirect Politeness and Sociocultural Values in American and Russian Cultures Beata Gallaher 204 strategies (hints) with an authority figure to be polite. ...
... However, it is also important to note the results of earlier research indicating in some collectivist cultures (e.g., the Emirati) team members may choose not to express their disappointment with an underperforming student, at least not verbally or directly to the student himself/herself [26]. This is because complaints are face-threatening acts [27] and members of collectivist cultures may refrain from complaining and expressing dissatisfaction explicitly with the belief that such confrontations prevent harmonious relationships [28]. Such teammates may desist even if it means overriding the task assigned [29]. ...
Engineering programs have to develop students' teamwork skills. However, the onus on content specialists to teach teamwork skills may be challenging partly because of students' negative attitudes towards and experiences with teamwork. This study investigated 295 engineering students' thoughts on teamwork and the strategies they used to solve problems with underperforming team members. Data were collected using a survey and a discourse completion task. The results revealed that among the key reasons why the students liked such activities was the exchange of information and experience, increased quantity and quality of work, and interpersonal communication. However, they indicated lack of harmony, social loafing, lack of attention paid to tasks, and individual approaches to learning as reasons for skepticism about teamwork. As to problem-solving strategies, emphatic inquiry and judgmental questioning were most common. Based on these results, we suggest that engineering faculty collaborate with communication instructors in planning and executing soft-skills training for students. Engineering faculty should also be provided with technical support for the incorporation of teamwork activities in virtual environments.
... This is, for instance, the case with complaints (Decock and Depraetere 2018) and (typically negative) consumer reviews , both of which can include requests for action. Following previous accounts of complaints (e.g., Olshtain and Weinbach 1993;Trosborg 1995), Decock and Depraetere (2018) propose that a complaint situation is made up of four constitutive components. One such component is the past or ongoing action/event that occurred and about which S is complaining (complainable). ...
This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use.
The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995.
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... Complaints are complex speech acts (Geluykens & Kraft 2008) that fall into two main categories: direct complaints (D'Amico-Reisner 1985) and indirect complaints (Boxer 1993(Boxer , 1996(Boxer , 2010. On the one hand, direct complaints involve situations, commonly based on a dissatisfactory event or experience, in which the speaker expresses displeasure or annoyance because of a particular action that affects him/herself (Olshtain & Weinbach 1993). On the other hand, indirect complaints refer to "the expression of dissatisfaction to an interlocutor about oneself or someone/ something that is not present" (Boxer 1996: 219). ...
Role-play tasks have been widely used in pragmatic research to explore spoken interaction. This instrument consists of situational scenarios purposefully designed to make participants elicit specific pragmatic data in controlled situations (Kasper & Youn 2017, Félix-Brasdefer 2018). Notwithstanding the widespread use of role-plays, some drawbacks have been identified concerning design (Hudson et al. 1995, Trosborg 1995, Youn 2015) and real-life consequences (Al-Gahtani & Roever 2012). Against this backdrop, this study presents a learner-centred approach to design situational scenarios based on participants’ examples of complaint situations. Specifically, an exemplar generation task and a likelihood questionnaire (Jianda 2006a, 2006b) were used to elaborate the role-play task. The study reports on the implementation of the learner-centred approach and its effectiveness to construct a role-play task. Furthermore, using retrospective verbal reports, this study discusses whether participants’ engagement in the design of the role-play task encouraged them to act out the situations, as they would do it in real-life contexts. The study evidences the usefulness of adopting a learner-centred approach to design the role-play task. In terms of performance, it seems that, in general, the participants would exhibit similar pragmatic behaviour in a real context. However, they were aware of the lack of real consequences role-play tasks carry.
Although American people are perceived as a cultural community with a positive attitude, they are sometimes mocked or criticized in the media for their exaggeration, superficiality, hypocrisy, or being “aggressively friendly.” On the other hand, the French are perceived by American people as complainers, pessimistic, cold, and arrogant. This study brings to light the differences in expressing positive emotions and opinions in French and American social contexts. Through an analysis of authentic conversations collected during “Speed-Friending” events, some language discrepancies will be revealed, so as to be later taught to future foreign language learners in order to reduce bad intercultural perceptions.
This discourse-pragmatic study examines why a past or on-going action become the focus of customer complaints in e-commerce service encounters. Analyzing interactions between customers and service agents on Taobao, the study reveals how customer complaints are triggered by perceived moral transgressions attributed to service agents. The findings identify two types of transgressions: distributive and interactional. The study highlights metapragmatic expressions that reveal customers’ beliefs about appropriate standards in the complaint resolution process. Customers perceive service agents as violating distributive justice by infringing on their benefactive, epistemic, and deontic rights, and as breaching interactional justice through lapses in responsibility and honesty. Overall, the study illustrates how customers’ metapragmatic perceptions of moral transgressions shape complaint interactions in e-commerce settings, providing crucial insights for both theoretical analysis and practical applications.
This study analyzes the production of complaint acts in both L2 Italian and native Italian. It focuses on examining the relationship between the prosodic indices used by Italian learners and native speakers during the production of complaints, as well as the (socio)pragmatic strategies employed to execute these acts. To this end, a sample of protests produced by Arabic-speaking and Spanish-speaking learners, as well as by a group of native speakers through oral role-plays, to analysis was analysed from both a socio-pragmatic and a phonetic perspective. The preliminary results indicate a diverse range of outcomes. The learners, although exhibiting some differences between the two groups, tend to utilise more direct strategies and fewer modifications, which at times results in a reduction in politeness, particularly in situations of greater social distance. The prosodic analysis, which was limited to the study of the directive speech acts present in the complaints, revealed the presence of narrow pitch ranges and shorter durations of nuclear vowels in learners. Furthermore, the orders produced by the learners exhibited a less prominent final falling of the intonation pattern, resulting in a more mitigated prosody than that observed in the native data. This study can contribute to a deeper understanding of the interlinguistic competencies of learners from more distant languages and cultures and serve as a valuable resource for teaching linguistic acts that are considered more complex due to their higher face-threatening nature.
This paper aims to conduct an analysis of the complaints as provided by an AI tool, ChatGPT. First, an overview of complaining speech act as a face-threatening act is provided regarding the multiple ways how it is defined and classified, as well as its relation to directness levels. Second, the complaining-realizing strategies with a wide range of modification devices have been summarized and applied as frameworks for scrutinizing AI complaints. Third, the perusal of the complaints gathered from ChatGPT indicates its general adherence to the three-part structure of complaining set, Buffer, Complaint, and Negotiation. The analysis also recorded the implementation of modification tools to show concerns for the interlocutors’ faces.
In this paper, we examine uses of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese speakers of English, which may trigger intercultural irritations. We investigate such problematic uses from a contrastive angle, by considering whether they relate to the fact that in Chinese there are two expressions which may be equivalents of English ‘don’t worry’: fangxin 放心 (lit. ‘ease your heart’) and bie-danxin 别担心 (lit. ‘don’t burden your heart’). First, we present uses of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese learners of English and examine them through the lens of speech acts and interaction. Second, we undertake a corpus-based study of the speech act-indicating interactional uses of ‘don’t worry’, fangxin and bie-danxin, teasing out their conventional uses. Finally, we consider whether uses of ‘don’t worry’ by Chinese learners of English are influenced by pragmatic transfer and, if so, what this transfer looks like.
The aim of this study is to identify the uses of the complaint speech act by learners of Turkish as a foreign language in different situations and locations, utilizing the speech act theory developed by Austin and Searle. The research, designed according to the case study pattern with a qualitative research approach, collected data from 87 participants using a single pattern sample. The responses given by the participants to the complaint speech act with the Speech Completion Test (SCT), consisting of seven different situations, have been classified according to strategies. In the classification, the strategies created by Trosborg in the Speech Completion Test for the complaint speech act; later additions made by Bikmen - Martı, and strategies obtained in the study of Murphy and Neu were used. The classified results were subjected to descriptive analysis. As a result of the evaluation of the obtained results, it is seen that the request strategy for compensation is most commonly used in complaint speech act situations. Participants used the direct behavior dimension 279 times for the complaint speech act. This result constitutes 50% of all responses. Participants have turned to direct actions to take action against situations. It has been determined that the mother tongues and foreign languages known by the participants, gender variables did not create a difference in the use of speech acts, but the change in the age factor caused various differences. This difference can be more clearly seen in terms of address and formality. It has been determined that the participants did not have difficulty in understanding the message to be given in the complaint speech act, and they were also successful in choosing appropriate forms of address and greetings according to the context.
In this study, we examine how criticising as a disciplinary action is conventionally realised in Chinese classroom contexts. By so doing, we provide a two‐fold contribution to the current special issue dedicated to Willis Edmondson. First, we examine criticising in an innovative way, by going beyond its traditional interpretation as a speech act, that is, we approach it as an interactional phenomenon which is conventionally realised by a cluster of expressions and speech acts. Second, we propose a bipartite approach to examine why and how instances of criticism as a disciplinary action in Chinese may puzzle foreign learners of Chinese.
This chapter starts with a literature review on complaints in institutional settings and discusses the face-threatening nature of complaints. It then focuses on the practices the customers use in complaint call openings, middles and ends and discusses their face-threatening potential (e.g., venting, use of lexical devices, reported speech, and manipulation of prosodic features). It also looks into the resources and practices used by the agent, such as passive resistance, topic shift, shifting of responsibility, and sequential deletion. The second part of the chapter explores online complaints. To this end, the chapter describes the characteristics of corporate Facebook pages and online complaints, outlining the most salient differences between spoken and written complaints. The analytical part focuses on the manifestations of impoliteness in online complaints, such as disattending and denials on the part of the agent and flaming and implicational impoliteness used by the customers. Moreover, the chapter discusses how the interactional organisation of Facebook complaints is shaped through its technological affordances.
The current study aimed to examine how university students complain and how professors respond to their complaints. Data were collected from 40 undergraduate students and 40 university professors at a private Egyptian university using role-plays. Students’ complaints were coded with the use of an adapted version of Trosborg’s (1995) coding scheme for complaint strategies while professors’ responses were coded based on an adapted version of Laforest’s (2002) model for complaint-response strategies. The results showed that half of the students’ complaints came in the form of requests for repair. This was followed by expressing disapproval, making accusations and casting blame. As for professors, they mostly partially accepted the students’ complaints through justifying themselves, suggesting alternatives and setting conditions for future acceptance. Interestingly, the social variables of gender and age did not generally have an influence on the realization of the speech acts of complaint and responding to complaints.
Speech acts in CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) have been receiving increasing attention in recent years. This study attempted to make a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and American online complaints of restaurants from the perspective of speech act structure in relation to face management. In spite of likeness in the general taxonomy of retrospective and prospective speech acts between the two corpora, addressivity appeared to be a strong factor affecting how face was managed in the specific construction of complaints as speech act sets in the Chinese data set, while such a discrepancy was absent from the American reviews where the face of restaurants and fellow consumers was not handled with much distinction and discretion. These findings in terms of the level of sensitivity and adaptation to the context seem to imply that the generally-recognized distinction of high-context vs. low-context between the two cultures is also manifested in online reviews.
This chapter describes the methods used in the study. It begins by introducing the reasons for an explanatory sequential mixed methods design and then describes the selection of participants in the research. Then, it moves on to the descriptions of the web-based quantitative data collection instruments and the qualitative interviews. Subsequently, a description of the data analysis approach is offered. Finally, ethical issues regarding the study are discussed.KeywordsResearch methodologyMixed methods designData collection methodsData collection instrumentsWeb-based surveyMotivation questionnaireAppropriate judgement tasksMultiple-choice listening questionnaireDiscourse completion tasksInterviews
This chapter first reports learners’ responses in the appropriateness judgement tasks (AJT) and semi-structured interviews concerning their L2 pragmatic awareness. The chapter then explores the relation between learners’ levels of L2 motivation and L2 pragmatic awareness. The results show that Chinese university students’ levels of pragmatic awareness were considerably associated with their attitude towards the L2 community and their intended learning efforts, but were not correlated with their overall level of L2 motivation. Intended learning efforts, together with attitude towards the L2 community and English learning per se, played a role in predicting learners’ levels of L2 pragmatic awareness. The study also shows that a mismatch between students’ English learning needs and outcomes of pragmatic acquisition, along with factors, such as a lack of pragmatic instruction, few opportunities to use pragmatic knowledge and the variety of pragmatic norms, may curb learners’ motivations to develop L2 pragmatic awareness.
This article explores the pragmatic act of complaining on WeChat Moments (henceforth Moments) focusing on the following question: When complaints are made in a social context where ratified viewers are hard to define, how are such acts constructed and construed? The multimodal data under study come from a project designed to address the under-examined issue of indirect complaints in Chinese social media. Drawing on the conceptualization of frame analysis in pragmatic studies and informed by a conversation analytical approach, this article proposes the concept of social complaints , accounting for how Moments users employ it performatively to deal with serious matters, to socialize and to manage rapport with people in their social networks. Teasing, it is found, is often performed in both complaints and responses to the complaints, which manifests Moments users’ flexible positioning strategies in handling interpersonal relations.
This is the first edited collection focusing exclusively on how second language users interpret and engage with the processes of email writing. With chapters written by an international array of scholars, the present volume is dedicated to furthering the study of the growing field of L2 email pragmatics and addresses a range of interesting topics that have so far received comparatively scant attention. Utilising both elicited and naturally-occurring data, the research in this volume takes the reader from a consideration of learners’ pragmatic development as reflected in email writing, and their perceptions of the email medium, to relational practices in various email functions and in a variety of academic contexts. As a whole, the contributions incorporate research with learners from a range of proficiency levels, language and cultural backgrounds, and employ varied research designs in order to examine different email speech acts. The book provides valuable new insights into the dynamic and complex interplay between cultural, interlanguage, pedagogical, and medium-specific factors shaping L2 email discourse, and it is undoubtedly an important reference and resource for researchers, graduate students and experienced language teachers.
This study investigates to what extent Turkish formal complaint letters followed the ‘Problem-Solution Pattern’ ( Hoey 1983 ), and on how the writers expressed their wishes when they explained their problem and asked the authorities to amend a mistake. The study is based on a corpus of 134 Turkish complaint letters. It draws upon Flowerdew’s ( 2008 , 2012 ) approach to the problem-solution pattern and the role of clause relations in this text pattern.
Results showed that age-old Turkish rhetorical norms led writers’ choice of lexico-grammatical patterns in reflecting politeness in order to maintain their own and the recipients’ faces. The speech acts (complaint and request) in the ‘Problem and Solution’ parts below were hedged and impersonalized. The Turkish traditional rhetorical formula that was used in the request does not explicitly ask the reader to do something; in this way, the writers attempt to protect both their own face and that of the reader.
The paper analyses complaining behaviour at the workplace across several languages (French, German in Austria and in Germany, Polish and Russian). As speech acts, complaints deal with socially unacceptable actions that are brought up as problematic issues retrospectively. This may include critical evaluative assessment or the request for compensation. Data have been collected using an online discourse completion task (DCT) including discourse scenarios in which the power distance between the participants as well as the weight of the transgression/misconduct varied. The results show that complaining strategies vary along several dimensions (e. g. mention of transgression +/-, justification of complaint +/-, way in which a solution or compensation is requested). The observed differences in complaining strategies can be interpreted in terms of culture-specific ways in which the relationship at the workplace is conceived of. Despite the general restrictions of DCT as a method of data collection, we suggest utilizing data and results derived from their analysis in the context of courses of intercultural business communication and of business language courses.
The series is the expression of the Center for Research on Teaching of Languages, which in Edizioni Ca’ Foscari also has a magazine, Linguistics Education - Language Education, EL.LE, and a necklace, Intercultural Communication, COMINT, dedicated to this important but overlooked aspect of language mastery. In the series, the volumes of which are approved by three blind referees before publication, are three types of search space: a. studies on the epistemologic nature of the science that studies language education, in the wider meaning that includes Italian mother tongue, second and foreign, modern languages and classical ones; b. operational studies on methods, strategies, language teaching methodologies; c. quantitative and qualitative surveys on particular aspects of language teaching in the various training areas. The collection hosts studies of scholars working both at Ca’ Foscari University and in other institutions.
This study examines Jordanian graduate students' complaints posted
on a Facebook closed group and directed to the representatives of Student Union
at Jordan University of Science and Technology to be transferred to the officials
concerned. In line with Boxer (1993), the study considers the students' complaints
to be indirect speech acts, as the addressee(s) are not the source of the
offense. Using a sample of 60 institutional complaining posts, the researchers
have analysed the complaints in terms of their semantic formulas, politeness
functions and correlations with the gender of the complainers. The students’
complaints are classified into six semantic formulas of which the act statement
element is indispensable as the complaint is stated in it. The other five formulas,
ordered according to their frequency, are opener, remedy, appreciative closing,
justification and others. Despite the negative affect typically involved in the
complaining act, the semantic formulas identified in this study are found to signal
politeness and fit into Brown and Levinson’s (1987) pool of face-saving strategies
rather than face-threatening acts. Specifically, when the graduate students direct
their Facebook complaints to the students' representatives, they tend to offer
camaraderie with them to be encouraged to pursue the problems specified in the
complainers’ posts.
The following study focuses on strategies of denial and evasion of company responsibility used in responding to complaints, negative and critical comments posted by consumers on English and Polish brand profiles on Twitter. The analysis shows that despite the face-threat these acts may pose to the consumer and, consequently, to the company’s image, the companies do not refrain from using strategies denying the complainable and disagreeing with the customer. The study shows that companies resort to a range of sub-strategies of evasion and denial of blame, such as referral to external circumstances and regulations, thanks, blaming a third party, statements of unawareness of the complainable, simple denial of the complainable, expression of personal opinion or criticism of the consumer, among others. The study indicated differences between the English and Polish profiles as to the range and frequency of use of the strategies of rejecting consumers’ complaints. The Polish corpus offers a greater occurrence and a wider range of evasion and denial strategies used in reaction to consumers’ negative or critical opinions and complaints.
Illocutionary force indicating devices are something of a neglected topic in visual/multimodal intercultural pragmatics, although a number of scholars have observed that some non-verbal speech-act markers have the characteristic that by employing them in a certain way one can actually accomplish the speech act itself. These not only provide a “catalog” of salient types of visual interactions recognized in a given culture, but also represent the best way into a systematic examination of all the divergent types of performative image. Backed by naturally occurring multimodal data (political cartoons and op-ed illustrations), this article considers the problem of identifying and cataloguing pictorial acts, given some problematic features, such as their implicit character and non-one-to-one mapping onto images. I also address the question of whether pictorial act markers are universal or culturally specific. Finally, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) pictorial illocutionary acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the cognitive context models of the participants (picture makers/viewers). All in all, this research should benefit not only multimodal and intercultural pragmatics, which is still in its infancy, but also work in the speech-act domain, which has been largely off the linguistics agenda since the 1970s and 1980s.
This study aims to uncover the complexity of emoji usage on Chinese social media. We investigate emoji usage in comments on push notifications from the WeChat official account of Guokr , which was chosen as a representative for an open forum for public communication. The data includes 2552 comments from 90 articles pushed by the account. The analysis adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective within the framework of intercultural pragmatics ( Kecskes 2014 ), taking into account both the local discourse environment and the cultural context. It is found that Chinese WeChat users show a preference for using emojis that are unique to the WeChat platform. Qualitative analyses were carried out on selected WeChat emojis used in comments fulfilling the speech acts of self-disclosure, self-praise, humor and complaining. Emojis are found to be used to perform and reinforce a sense of playfulness in social media, but underlying this playfulness there is a discursive conformity to social norms in real life. The use of emojis resolves the tension between the openness and freedom in social media and the conservative, constraint-bounded nature of established social norms.
Depending on context: to depict soaring prices as fires is to perform the act of complaining ; to portray the perpetrator of a sex crime as a wolf is to accomplish the action of condemning ; to draw the ship of state sailing toward catastrophe is simultaneously to perform the action of warning and to issue a prediction; etc. It follows that, if political cartooning is action, then having a cartoon spiked is failure to act. The discussion of silenced speech acts cannot fail to have already been noticed by other scholars. Yet, so far little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, especially in multimodal and intercultural pragmatics. Apart from substantiating the claim that it makes sense to study speech acts in political cartoons, this article investigates the situational factors that may affect the editorial decision-making of a given newspaper. Using a corpus of selected American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian cartoons, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) visual speech acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the context models of the participants (cartoonists/viewers).
Taking into account that people are reluctant to engage in a conflictual interaction but also that the recognition and interpretation of a complaint is very much contingent on the discourse in which it appears, the present paper adopts a conversation analytic perspective and studies complaints in ordinary conversation. In terms of politeness research, complaints are characterized as ‘face threatening acts’, with the analysis focusing either on the mitigation strategies the complainer may employ or on the description of the acts that are at the complainee’s disposal. From a wider perspective, the most prominent feature of complaints is that they transform an individual’s trouble into an acknowledgeable interpersonal problem. The present research focuses on complaints addressed to participants in the on-going interaction (direct complaints), explicating instances where members themselves reveal their understanding of the complaint. Special attention is given to the mitigation and accounting practices a complainee employs, i.e. noticings, anticipatory apologies and (preemptive) accounts, which all aim to withhold the disaffiliative complaint. Through these practices, not only does the candidate complaint-recipient mitigate the impact of his/her accountability but also third party participants attempt to avoid the delivery of the complaint. The data of the study consist of 20 audio-recorded conversations between friends and relatives and are drawn from the Corpus of Spoken Greek of the Institute of Modern Greek Studies.
The study investigates the strategies used by English and Polish companies in the process of handling customer complaints on Twitter. Since English and Polish are recognized as representatives of negative and positive politeness cultures, respectively, the analysis was to examine if there are differences in politeness conventions in customer-provider interaction on Twitter. The study found that although similar strategies are used by English and Polish companies in responding to complaints, the frequency of the respective strategies is different. The results of the analysis confirm differences in the use of positive and negative politeness strategies as well as differences in the level of directness in interaction between English and Polish profiles.
The present study aimed to examine the speech act of correction produced by Chinese, Americans, and Chinese EFL learners. A total of 120 participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with two major parts: a Scaled Response Questionnaire (SRQ) and a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Elicited data were analyzed in terms of three perspectives: perception of face-threat, overall correction strategy use, and the use of external modifications. The results showed some similarities and differences between Chinese and Americans' corrections. As for the EFL learners, they exhibited their interlan-guage development in the perception and overall strategy use. In addition, instances of L1 pragmatic transfer were found in the learners' use of some individual strategies and external modifications. Learners' interlanguage development and L1 socio-cultural transfer demonstrated the multi-competence of the learners. The present study suggests that further instruction should be implemented to enrich L2 learners' pragmatic repertoire for successful ELF communication.
The current study adopts a dialogue-analytic approach to the examination of complaint behavior in Saudi Arabic as spoken in the Najd region, the central region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To this end, role-plays with 120 Saudi nationals who are Najdi-speakers were recorded and transcribed. Statistical comparisons revealed that Najdis used a variety of complaint strategies with requests for repair, expressing annoyance and providing modified blame being the most frequent. Najdis also produced a large number of initiators and internal and external modifiers, mainly to mitigate the negative force of complaints. Although a small influence was found for gender, the variables of age, social distance and social dominance showed a strong influence on the Najdis’ complaint behavior. The results are discussed in light of relevant theoretical models and the existing literature.
A growing body of literature has investigated impoliteness in many domains. Nevertheless, little research has examined impoliteness done by foreign language learners. Impoliteness used in interlanguage complaints by English as a foreign language learners was observed. The effects of interlocutors’ different status levels and social distance on the use of impoliteness were analyzed. Empirical data were elicited by means of oral discourse completion tasks from 50 Indonesian English as a foreign language learners in Central Java, Indonesia. The overall direction of the findings showed trends that status levels and social distance between interlocutors prompted different frequencies and strategies of impoliteness. The frequent use of impolite complaints was instigated by a number of factors such as the learners’ understanding about the speech act in question, their perceptions on the social distance and status levels of interlocutors, and the nature of the research instrument.
Few studies have investigated the development of L2 complaints. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of L2 complaints produced by Chinese university English learners based on their performance of a discourse completion task consisting of 18 complaint scenarios in terms of power (+P, =P, −P) and social distance (−D, =D, +D), supplemented by a delayed retrospective verbal report. Data were collected twice, over two academic years. The results indicate that students in these two ‘phases’ showed broadly similar patterns of sociopragmatic competence in terms of their ability to calibrate complaints to complainees’ (addressees’) position on power and social distance continua. However, as to internal modifications, learners in Phase 2 used significantly more lexical and syntactic downgraders than in Phase 1 at all levels of power and social distance except for syntactic downgraders at +D and =D; they only used significantly more lexical upgraders at −D. As for external modifications, the findings also showed significantly different patterns in the use of pre-moves at all levels and post-moves at all levels except at −P. Increase of English proficiency and a certain degree of explicit pragmatic instruction may have contributed to Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic development. Implications for pragmatic instruction are also discussed.
The purpose of this study is to explore the components that foreign language learners need to acquire in order to develop their pragmatic competence. This paper presents a description of phase one of an ongoing research project at Goce Delcev University-Stip, Republic of Macedonia, on developing pragmatic competence of foreign language learners. We first define pragmatic competence; then we discuss data collection instruments and procedures; and we conclude with an outlook on further research.
A survey of the field of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) shows that the Discourse Completion Test (DCT)2, also referred to as a ‘discourse completion task’ or a ‘production questionnaire’, has been the most frequently used instrument to evaluate second/foreign language learners’ ability to perform speech acts in a target language, despite the harsh criticism leveled against its low construct validity and its failure to represent the features of authentic discourse. Interestingly, focusing on the statement of objectives of a number of ILP studies using DCTs, one can notice that such studies rarely refer to the DCT as a language test. In addition, an overview of the DCT design process as described in several ILP studies shows that ever since its adaptation for the study of pragmatic ability (Blum-Kulka, 1982), there has been a tendency to use or adapt one of the existing DCT versions used in previous studies based on the argument of comparability of results. While a number of ILP researchers tried to improve the design of the DCT by the inclusion of rejoinders or by enhancing the prompt material (e.g. Billmyer and Varghese, 2000), few attempts have been made to reconsider the DCT development process. McNamara and Roever (2006: 253) urge for the need for “more research on testing of sociopragmatic knowledge and design of discourse completion tests for testing purposes.”The present paper starts with an overview of the literature about DCTs with special reference to the cognitive validity of the instrument and to previous studies dealing with DCT structure and content. Then, with reference to research in the fields of language testing and psychometrics, it shows that, whether used for research or instructional purposes, the DCT shares several qualities with language tests. As such, it is argued that the DCT should be treated as a language test and not as a questionnaire and should, thus, undergo a rigorous developmental process. Based on recent models of language test construction, the paper concludes with an overview of the stages of DCT development.
This article explores the workings of memes as cultural capital in web-based communities. A grounded analysis of 4chan’s /b/ board reveals three main formulations of memes as capital, delineating them as subcultural knowledge, unstable equilibriums, and discursive weapons. While the first formulation follows well-documented notions about subcultural knowledge as a basis for boundary work, the latter two focus on the dualities intrinsic to Internet memes. The contradiction between following conventions and supplying innovative content leads to memes’ configuration as unstable equilibriums, triggering constant conflict about their “correct” use. Paradoxically, this struggle highlights collective identity, as it keeps shared culture at the center of discussion. Similarly, when memes are used as jabs at the most intense points of arguments, they function simultaneously as signifiers of superior authoritative status and as reminders of common affinity. Thus, the dualities underpinning memes’ structure lead to their performance as contested cultural capital.
This article analyzes how negotiation between social actors, the public, and the regulator over satirical texts leads to the construction of social boundaries vis-à-vis freedom of speech and creativity in a given society. It does so by analyzing 906 public complaints filed with the Israeli regulator between 2005 and 2010 and the regulators’ responses to them. According to the analysis, there are four issues that trigger public discontent regarding satirical content: broadcasting content unsuitable for children, mocking weak societal sectors, mocking national symbols, and mocking various sociopolitical sectors. The regulators’ responses to these complaints regarding each issue sheds light not only on the diverse perspectives held by these actors, but also on the role of the regulator in granting satirists maximum freedom of expression, mediating between public demands to limit such freedom and professional broadcasting norms. The article concludes by discussing the ramifications of this negotiation for the future of broadcast satire.
Scholars of politeness admit that being insulted may be the result of the hearer’s assumptions about the other’s behavior and may not necessarily relate to the actual words or intentions of the speaker. Thus, it is surprising to find only a few accounts of how people are doing “being insulted” or of how, in public discourse, responses to insults are strategically employed for various ends. In this paper, I analyze the meta-pragmatics of “hurt feelings” in order to understand how speakers do things with emotions and the role of hurt feelings in political democratic discourse. By examining instances in which public figures have stated their feelings of insult in Israeli public discourse (1997–2012), I show both how hurt feelings are strategically employed to protest against politically unacceptable acts, and how public actors sometimes explicitly refuse to be insulted, shifting the meaning of what is perceived as an insult by side-participants into a compliment. I conclude by discussing the consequences of manifesting hurt feelings in political discourse.
This study examines the conditions under which public manifestation of discontent can lead to changes in the broadcasting of offensive media content. Our analysis is based on ethnographic research within the ombudsman at a regulatory institution in Israel, on content analysis of 2142 complaints regarding perceived inappropriate broadcasted content between the years 2005 and 2010, and on an examination of public discourse surrounding controversial programs in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Our analysis indicates that successful complaints share three conditions that collectively lead media organizations to amend broadcasted contents: the complaints name a socially sensitive identity within a specific broadcasting culture, the complaints are numerous and represent diversified public sectors, and the complaints are accompanied by a heated public debate around the perceived offence. We elaborate on each of these conditions and conclude by discussing the effectiveness of public complaints as a discursive device in participatory culture.
The act of complaining takes place in home and institutional settings in many forms every day. However, it is an under-represented speech act compared with the wealth of studies on other speech acts such as requesting, apologising, refusing and responding to compliments. The recent studies on complaint making have concentrated on the discussion about the nature of the act, identification of its communicative features and interlanguage or cross-cultural comparison among adult speakers or second language learners at different proficiency levels. Very little is known about the strategy preferences and realisation patterns of the act made by young and teenage second language learners.
This study attempts to provide a fuller picture of how a complaint is realised in an oral-production task by learners of English from childhood to their teens. Based on the transcribed spoken discourse of 176 and 156 young and teenage Cantonese learners of English in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools, it was found that their complaints were moderate in terms of directness and severity. There was a significant decreasing use of direct strategies but a growing sociopragmatic awareness and flexibility in the use of a direct single strategy towards less direct combined strategies according to age and level of study. Pragmalinguistically, the learners used a similar range of intensifiers and softeners. The teenage groups are, however, better at increasing or mitigating the force of the act through the use of supportive moves, descriptions and requesting. The study has demonstrated some evidence for the interlanguage pragmatic development of Cantonese learners of English in the act of complaining.
This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed, or the sociopragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many didactic materials do not address holistically. Integrating relevant findings about complaint behaviour from pragmatics and various neighbouring disciplines, these pedagogical steps combine distinct teaching approaches, include production tasks and guidelines for assessment. Moreover, these steps also comprise an account of some communicative effects of complaints from the cognitive framework of relevance theory with a view to fostering learners' meta-psychological awareness.
This study aims firstly to compare the complaints of local native-Malay speakers and expatriate native-English speakers in Brunei in terms of move structure and levels of directness combined with the frequency of modality markers; and secondly, it attempts to address the relationship between polite behaviour and its effectiveness in eliciting the appropriate response from the hearer. Data from an oral discourse completion task show interesting similarities and differences in the complaint move structure between the two groups of speakers. Superficially, there appears to be no significant difference between the two sets of complaints in terms of levels of directness, but a detailed analysis shows each group employing different mitigating strategies to minimise the force of a complaint. Furthermore, responses from an acceptability judgement questionnaire indicate that being indirect, and therefore polite, may not be effective in eliciting the appropriate response to a request for action in a complaint speech act.
Computer-mediated communication tools have allowed users to interact across geographical and temporal borders. Among them, emails are extensively used for communicative, pedagogical, and social purposes, but relatively little research attention has been paid to the social interaction or speech styles in them. This study explored complaint strategies and discourse features, focusing on supportive moves and internal modifiers, of instructor- and peer-directed emails produced by English learners of low and intermediate levels, with each group being consisted of twenty-two participants. The results showed that the two groups were similar in complaint strategies used towards the instructor and peers by preferring explicit complaints and also in the production of significantly more supportive moves and downgraders towards the instructor to reduce the face threat. Nonetheless, justification, preferred by the intermediate learners as a supportive move, offered a legitimate stance to complain and appeared to make emails more appropriate and more effective to appease the addressee’s unhappiness than the sole use of formulaic expressions of politeness, utilized most often by the low learners. This study suggested that whereas the low learners were still at the first phase of the interlanguage development characterized by the use of simple formulas, the intermediate learners had slightly moved forward.
Refusals have been widely examined across languages in the literature. However, few attempts have been made to elicit both perception and performance data for method-triangulation. In addition, Chinese EFL learners' refusals are relatively less investigated. The present study aims to bridge this gap and has two major purposes. One is to examine the cross-cultural differences between Chinese and English refusals. The other is to study how Chinese EFL learners perceive and perform the speech act of refusal. The data were recruited from three participant groups: 30 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan (NSC), 30 Chinese EFL learners in Taiwan (EFL), and 30 native speakers of American English in America (NSE). The research instrument was a questionnaire with two major parts: Scaled Response Questionnaire (SRQ) and Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Elicited data were analyzed in terms of three perspectives: perception of face-threat, overall strategy use, and strategy patterns. The results showed the similarities and differences between Chinese and English refusals. As for EFL learners, they tended to perceive the face-threat greater, and used more strategies and softening devices than Chinese and Americans. In addition, some L2 native expressions were never used by learners. Further instructions are needed to help learners refuse others appropriately.
Processes of media answerability are important for the professional conduct of media organizations and their analysis allows a better understanding of the negotiation among public actors over journalistic practices perceived as deviant. By intersecting public criticism over perceived deviant political interviews with Israeli ombudsmen’s responses to these complaints, our aims are to (1) characterize processes of media answerability within the institution of the ombudsman and in the open public arena; (2) identify diversions between the public and the ombudsmen perspectives regarding perceived deviating practices (over-aggressive and over-deferent style of interviewing) and their causes (political bias and violations of interpersonal codes of behavior); (3) pinpoint the outcomes of media answerability processes. Our findings suggest that while a disrespectful attitude toward public figures bothers the public more than an overly deferential approach, the ombudsmen tend to reject both types of complaint. At the causal level, while citizens point to interviewers’ ideological bias as the main explanation for all types of deviations, the ombudsmen tend to accept complaints regarding violations of interpersonal codes of behavior and reject claims of political bias. In conclusion, we point to the advantages and limitations of a media answerability process.
The purpose of this study is to characterize the complaint/complaint-response sequence in everyday conversations between people who are on intimate terms. More specifically, the intent is to examine the form taken by the complaint and the form of the response elicited from the hearer, and to bring out the relation between the complaint as an act and the argument as a genre of conversation. The complaints analyzed, taken from a corpus of family conversations recorded in Montréal, have preferential realization patterns that can be linked in part to the intimacy of the relationship between the interactants: In many ways, they are uttered without the special precautions generally associated with face-threatening acts. The complainees most often reject the blame leveled at them. But well characterized arguments are virtually absent from the corpus. The entry into the argument is negotiated in the speech turns that follow the complaint/response sequence, and the argument only breaks out if the complainer questions the value of the complainee's response. Both interactants use numerous strategies for avoiding an argument and, more often than not, they succeed. The strategies they use can be seen as indicators of the status of verbal confrontation in the Québec community.
Recently, a promising topic in computer-assisted language learning is the application of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology for assisting learners to engage in meaningful speech interactions. Simulated real-life conversation supported by the application of ASR has been suggested as helpful for speaking. In this study, a web-based conversation environment called CandleTalk, which allows learners to seemingly talk with the computer, was developed to help EFL learners receive explicit speech acts training that leads to better oral competence. CandleTalk is equipped with an ASR engine that judges whether learners provide appropriate input. Six speech acts are presented as the foci of the materials with local cultural information incorporated as the content of the dialogues to enhance student motivation. The materials were put to use on 29 English major and 20 non-English major students in order to investigate their learning outcome and perception in an EFL context. Oral proficiency assessment using the format of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) given before and after the use of CandleTalk and an evaluation questionnaire were two instruments used for data collection. The results of the study showed that the application of ASR was helpful for the college freshmen in the teaching of speech acts, particularly for the non-English major students. Most learners perceived positively toward the instruction supported with speech recognition.
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