speech act of complaint

Pragmatic competence, a fundamental component of language ability, involves understanding a speaker’s intended meaning through various communicative functions. Among these functions, speech acts such as refusals and complaints play a crucial role in everyday interactions, allowing interlocutors to convey information and perform social actions. This study examines the production of refusal and complaint speech acts by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, addressing a gap in previous research that has often overlooked the potential influence of learners’ language proficiency, social status, gender, and mother tongue. Through purposive sampling, 120 participants were selected to respond to 10 role-play scenarios designed to elicit refusals and complaints. The data were analyzed qualitatively to identify patterns in speech act production. The findings reveal that most participants favored indirect strategies when expressing refusals and complaints. Moreover, the study found no significant effects of language proficiency, sociocultural background, mother tongue, or gender on how EFL learners produce these speech acts. These results contribute to a better understanding of pragmatic competence in EFL contexts and suggest that these sociolinguistic factors may have less impact on refusal and complaint strategies than previously assumed.

Indirect complaints (ICs) most often serve as rapport-inspiring speech behavior, whose affiliation by the recipient of complaint preserves solidarity among peers. The purpose of the present paper was to investigate the themes and response strategies used by Iranian students as an act of IC in the university context. Drawing on a mixed methods research design, the result of a thorough thematic analysis of the collected conversational data revealed that the themes Iranian students tend to use as an IC are not independent of their gender. In addition, two new IC response strategies were identified, namely attribution and admonishment. Hence, in order to account for all of the strategies used by Iranian students to respond to ICs, the existing categorizations are to be expanded. It was also discovered that only through explicit or embedded commiseration there is more potential of longer interactions among participants of conversations. The present study sheds some light on the pragmatics of the Persian language.