Indirect Complaint as an Act of Rapport-Inspiring Speech Behavior:The Case of Iranian Studentsin the University Context

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate the themes and response strategies used by Iranian students as an act of indirect complaint (IC) in the university context. To do so, conversational data were collected from naturally occurring speech, resulting in 168 IC exchanges which were thematically analyzed based on the categorizations proposed by Boxer (1993b). This means that ICs were coded and classified into three themes as initiating moves and six categories as response strategies. Furthermore, the obtained data were processed statistically with the use of IBM SPSS Statistics 24. Having tabulated the data through Crosstab Tables, Chi-square test of independence and Cramer’s V test were used to examine the relationship, as well as the strength of the association, between Iranian students’ gender and the themes they tend to use as an IC. The findings revealed that self ICs were the least frequent and that female students used twice as many self ICs as male students did. In addition, two new IC response strategies were identified, namely attribution and admonish. It was also discovered that among other IC response strategies, only through explicit or embedded commiseration there is more potential of longer interactions among participants of conversations. A detailed discussion of the findings and suggestions for further research are provided. The present study sheds some light on the pragmatics of Persian language.