Intercultural realizations of complaints: Comparing Persian and Spanish-speaking learners of English

The objective of the present study is to examine realizations of complaint strategies as used by Iranian and Colombian learners of English through data elicited by means of a discourse completion task from 33 Persian-speaking Iranian and 33 Spanish-speaking Colombian advanced learners. The corpus of complaints was analyzed using Olshtain and Weinbach’s (1993) and Murphy and Neu’s (1996) coding schemes of complaints. The findings indicated that, for both groups, the most frequent complaint strategies included explanation of purpose, requests, and demands, and the least frequent ones were threat and warning. Besides, unlike social distance (SD), relative power (P) affected complaints to a significant degree in that while higher SD did not necessarily lead to a more polite response, the learners chose to either opt out (i.e., refrain from complaining) when addressing a high-status interlocutor or utilize a far politer requestive strategy. The findings indicate that the addressee’s status (i.e., higher, lower or equal) and rate of imposition substantially impact on the learners’ choice of the complaint strategy type. Furthermore, attempts at politeness were seen on the part of both groups particularly in asymmetric situations. Both groups mitigated their complaints through indirectness, use of requestive strategies, hedging, amongst others. However, Colombian learners’ complaints tended to sound more direct and more frequently mitigated than their Iranian counterparts. Further, the relative similarity between Colombian learners’ complaints and those produced by American native speakers of English might indicate that geographic proximity as well as cultural similarity to native-speaking settings (i.e., Colombia and US versus Iran and US) affects the participants’ use of complaint strategies.