The illocutionary act of complaint in interlanguage pragmatics: a case study

Abstract

The current paper presents a study that analyzes the illocutionary act of complaint performed by Spanish speakers of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PLE). It describes the act of complaint by (i) identifying its semantic information (Murphy & Neu, 1996); (ii) tracing realization trends regarding the degree of face-threat (Olshtain & Weinbach, 1993); and (iii) pointing out the main linguistic mechanisms used. Data analysis allows us to draw some conclusions, namely: (i) formal and informal contexts present different semantic formulas; (ii) language choices are highly conditioned by the variables ‘social distance’ and ‘power’; (iii) courtesy strategies are mostly used in formal contexts and may even be absent in informal contexts.