Complaints : a cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies
Date
2000
Authors
Sauer, Melanie
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Abstract
At the center of this study is the investigation of the use of pragmatic strategies in the speech act of complaining as realized by native speakers of Canadian English, native speakers of German, and German ESL learners of advanced proficiency. Complaints are intrinsically face-threatening speech acts. Due to the inherent clash between exercising their functional purpose and maintaining good relations with the interlocutor, complainers use various pragmatic strategies and directness levels to adjust the face-threat to the hearer. It is therefore crucial that non-native speakers be aware of target-like pragmatic behavior. Comparisons of the three groups concerning the selection of these strategies provide insights into cross-cultural differences between Germans and Canadians. They also provide insights into interlanguage features of the group of language learners and their position in relation to both groups of native speakers.
Complaints were collected from a total of 42 respondents, with 14 respondents in each group. All participants responded to a total of 12 identical situations in a closed oral role-play. The responses ·were tape-recorded and then transcribed for the analysis. Based on this collected data, a functional set of complaint categories was developed for the strategic analysis, consisting of four complaint categories: addressing the problem, requesting repair, justifying, and assigning blame. Each category is subcategorized with various levels of directness.
Analyses were carried out on three main pragmatic aspects: ( a) The respondents' feedback about their perception of the situational context and their responses. These responses concerned the level of frustration resulting from each situation, decisions to opt out of the complaint in real-life, and their ratings of the directness of the complaints. (b) The respondents' use of pragmalinguistic strategies in the complaints, specifically the length of the complaints, the directness employed in the complaint categories, and the number of modality markers used in the complaints. ( c) The influence of the two sociopragmatic factors, social distance and social power, on the selection of the pragmalinguistic strategies.
Results indicate pragmalinguistic differences in the perception and realization of complaints between native speakers of German and native speakers of Canadian English. While the group of German ESL learners showed some resemblance to Canadian complaint behavior, their overall use of pragmatic strategies indicates a high degree of transfer from their native language into the second language. The sociopragmatic analysis revealed that learners adjusted their pragmatic strategies based on social constellations - a fact which resembled Canadian complaining behavior. The findings indicate that even at an advanced stage in their linguistic knowledge, language learners tend to cling to the pragmatic strategies used in their native language in this very personal domain of language use.