Complaint and Politeness Strategies used by Iranian Speakers of English

Narges Masjedi, Shamala Paramasivam

Abstract


Complaint is a face threatening act and it happens when a speaker reacts with anger to things which go wrong or to a speech or an action which affected him/her unfavorably. Therefore, complaints can engender social relationship breakdown. However, a complainer can use politeness when he/she aims to maintain a good relationship with complainee or to mitigate the severity of his/her complaint and face threat. This study aims to investigate the complaint speech act with regard to the strategies and structure used as well as the politeness strategies employed by Iranian learners in communication with other nationalities in the academic context of a university. Searle’s (1969) speech act theory and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory comprised the theoretical framework of the study. The data were elicited through open-ended discourse completion task questionnaire from 50 Iranian learners. The data were analyzed using pragmatics as the approach within discourse analysis. The findings show that Iranians are able to draw on a variety of strategies and structures and adapt them in a flexible manner when faced with various complaint-provoking situations. Culturally, the findings show that Iranians are indirect and exercise negative politeness as they try to minimize the face threatening act of complaining. However, when the situation demands for it, they can be direct in their manner of speech.

Keywords


Speech Act, Complaint Strategies, Complaint Structure, Politeness Strategies, Pragmatic Competence, Iranian Learners

Full Text:

PDF

References


Abdolrezapour, P., Dabaghi, A., and Kassaian, Z. (2012). Iranian EFL Learner’s Realization of Complaints in American English. Journal of Language Studies, 12(2): 711-725.

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do Things with Words. Oxford University Press: New York.

Bachman, L. (1990). Fundamental Consideration in Language Testing. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1996). Pragmatics and language teaching: Bringing pragmatics and pedagogy together. Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series. 7: 21:39.

Blum-Kulka, S. (1982). Learning how to say what you mean in a second language: A study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied linguistics. 3: 29-59.

Blum-Kulka, S., and House, J. (1989). Cross-cultural and Situational Variation in Requesting Behavior. In S. Blum-Kulka, J. House, and G. Kasper (Eds.). Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (pp. 123-154). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Bodman, J., & Eisenstein, M. (1988). May God increase your bounty: The expressions of gratitude in English by native and non-native speakers. Cross currents, 15(1), 1-21.

Brown, P., and Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In E. Goody (Ed.), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction (pp. 56-310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P., and Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals of Language Use. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

De Leon, K. D., and Parina, J. C. M. (2016). A Study of Filipino Complaints in English and Tagalog. The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 22(1): 191-206.

Farnia, M. and Raja Rozina R.S. (2009). An interlanguage pragmatic study of expressing gratitude by Iranian EFL learners- A pilot study. Malaysian Journal of ELT Research. 5: 108-148.

Geluykens, R.and Kraft, B. (2007). Gender variation in native and interlanguage complaints. In B. Kraft and R. Geluykens. (eds.). Cross-cultural pragmatics and interlanguage English. Muenchen: LincomGmbH.

Graddol, D. (2006) English Next 2006, British Council. Online. Available: www.britishcouncil.org/ learning-research-englishnext (accessed 5 August 2010).

Gumperz, J. (1978). Forward. In P. Brown and S. C. Levinson (eds.). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, J. (2014). Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication. London and New York: Routledge.

Leech, G. (1983). The principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.

Moon, K. (2002). Speech act study: Differences between native and non-native speakers’ complaint strategies. TESOL Working Papers series 1. College of Arts and Sciences, American University.

Li, R. (2015). An Investigation into Chinese EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Competence. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 15(2), 101-118.

Olshtain, E. and Weinbach, L. (1987). Complaints: A study of speech act behavior among native and nonnative speakers of Hebrew. In J. Verschueren and M. Bertuccelli-Papi. (eds.). The pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 195-208.

Rinnert, C., and Nogami, Y. (2006). Preferred complaint strategies in Japanese and English. Authentic communication: Proceedings of the 5th Annual JALT Pan-SIG Conference, 32-47.

Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. London: Cambridge University Press.

Sifianou, M. (1992). The use of diminutives in expressing politeness: Modern Greek versus English. Journal of Pragmatics. 17: 155-173.

Tanck, S. (2002). "Speech Act Sets of Refusal and Complaint: A comparison of Native and Non-Native English Speakers' Production". Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wang, H. -Y. (2008). (Im) Politeness in Casual Conversations among Female Mandarin Speakers: a Practice-based Perspective. The University of Texas, Arlington.

Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wijayanto, A., Laila, M., Prasetyarini, A., and Susiati, S. (2013). Politeness in Interlanguage Pragmatics of Complaints by Indonesian Learners of English. English Language Teaching, 6(10): 188-201. Canadian Center of Science and Education.

Wolfson, N. (1986). Compliments in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In Valdes, J. M. Culture bound: Bridging the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching, (112- 123) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yule, G. (1996): Yule, G. (1996). The study of language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.3p.38

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Bookmark and Share


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2012-2023 (CC-BY) Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. 

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature

To make sure that you can receive messages from us, please add the journal emails into your e-mail 'safe list'. If you do not receive e-mail in your 'inbox', check your 'bulk mail' or 'junk mail' folders.