Version 4.2

Lecture: How do you complain in your everyday life?

A cross-cultural comparison of complaint realization and modification strategies among Italian and German women

The present research aims to establish the differences and similarities between the complaint realization and modification patterns of Italian and German. The speech act Complaint plays an important role in everyday and business communication (Meinl 2010) but, since it is intrinsically face-threatening (Brown & Levinson 1987), culture-inclined realization and modification strategies can cause cross-cultural misunderstandings or even harm the relationship between the interlocutors (Trosborg 1995). The present paper therefore analyses these pattern pragmatically, in order to reconsider universal versus culture-specific norms in language use. It further aims to fill the gap of missing cross-cultural research on complaints between Italian and German. The data for analysis were gathered through the combination of an oral DCT, conducted on WhatsApp, and an online evaluation questionnaire. The investigation of the oral responses, prompted through ten scenarios, led to the conclusion that even if the distribution of the realization strategies performed by the participants was similar, the differences in the use of modification devices and of additional directive acts can have an impact on the cross-culturally perceived directness level of complaint utterances. Overall, German participants tended to use more internal modification devices such as intensifiers, whereas the Italian group opted more often for external modification structures such as disarmers. The two groups of informants further differed in the answers’ structure: they were more formulaic in the German corpus, and longer and more complex in the Italian repertoire.

References:
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987): Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meinl, M. E. (2010). Electronic Complaints: An Empirical Study on British English and German
Complaints on eBay. Doctoral Dissertation, Bonn University. Retrieved from: http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de/2010/2122/2122.htm
Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage pragmatics: Requests, complaints and apologies. Berlin, New-York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Info

Day: 2019-05-25
Start time: 14:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: 100 / Hörsaal XIII
Track: Applied linguistics
Language: en

Links:

Feedback

Click here to let us know how you liked this event.

Concurrent Events