A pragmatic study of complaint strategies as used by Egyptian Arabic speakers | ||||
| المجلة العلمیة لکلیة الآداب-جامعة دمياط | ||||
| Article 5, Volume 10, Issue 3, July 2021, Page 123-138 PDF (300.62 K) | ||||
| Document Type: المقالات البحثية | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/artdau.2021.81403.1032 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
سارة ماهر مصطفى عبده 
| ||||
| کلية الآداب- جامعة دمياط- قسم اللغة الانجليزية | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| This is a pragmatic study to investigate the communicative behavior of Egyptian Arabic Speakers (EASs) in the act of complaining. The participants of the study consist of 50 Egyptian Arabic Speakers (EASs). They are requested to complete a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) involving six complaint-inducing scenarios. Trosborg's taxonomy of complaint strategies (1995) is used for classifying data, with three additional strategies presented in Yian's (2008) research. That is, the study yields eleven strategies for expressing complaints. The participants’ performance is analyzed with respect to the social variables included in the complaint situation, namely, social distance and social power. Moreover, the severity of the wrong is, also, examined with the aim of identifying to which degree it influences the participants’ selection of strategy. The findings of the study revealed that Egyptians use a variety of strategies when expressing complaints. Furthermore, participants’ performance varies regarding the social distance and social power included in a specific context. In addition, the severity of the wrong plays a great role in affecting participants’ way of complaining. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Speech Acts; Complaint Strategies; Social Power; Social Distance | ||||
| References | ||||
|
Arafah, B., & Kaharuddin, A. (2019). The representation of complaints in English and Indonesian discourses. Opción, 35, 501-517.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Boxer, D. (2010). Complaints: How to gripe and establish rapport. In A. Martinez-Flor & E. Uso-Juan (Eds.), Speech act performance: Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues (pp. 163-178). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.26.10box
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Ezzaoua, O. (2020). The interlanguage of Moroccan EFL learners: The case of complaints. Studies in Literature and Language, 20(1), 6-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11483
Gass, S., & Selinker, L. (2008). Second language acquisition: An introductory course (3rded.). Routledge.
Jalilifar, A. (2009). Request strategies: Cross-sectional study of Iranian EFL learners and Australian native speakers. English Language Teaching, 2(1), 46-61.
Laforest, M. (2002). Scenes of family life: Complaining in everyday conversation. Journal of pragmatics, 34(10-11), 1595-1620.
Moon, Y. (1996). Interlanguage features of Korean EFL learners in the communicative act of complaining [Doctoral dissertation]. Indiana University.
-Murphy, B. & Neu, J. (1996). My grade's too low: The speech act set of complaining. In S. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language (pp. 191-216). Mouton de Gruyter.
Olshtain, E., & Weinbach, L. (1987). Complaints: A study of speech act behavior among native and nonnative speakers of Hebrew. In J. Verschueren & M. Bertuccelli-Papi (Eds.), The pragmatic perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 international pragmatics conference (pp. 195-208). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbcs.5.15ols
Olshtain, E., & Weinbach, L. (1993). Interlanguage features of the speech act of complaining. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics (pp. 108-122). Oxford University Press.
Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage pragmatics: Requests, complaints, and apologies. Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110885286
Yian, W. (2008). A study of the speech act of complaining: Cross-cultural perspectives and interlanguage perspectives. Intercultural Forum, 1(2). http://comm.louisville.edu/iic/IF%20Journal/IF%201%20(2)%202008/if1( 2)2008-wang-yian.html
Zhoumin, Y. (2011). A contrastive study of American and Chinese university students’ complaining strategies. Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 34(1), 111-125. https://doi.org/10.1515/CJAL.2011.008 | ||||
|
Statistics Article View: 326 PDF Download: 458 |
||||
