Sofia Rüdiger, Daria Dayter

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Sofia Rüdiger, Daria Dayter

Speak your mind, but watch your mouth: complaints in CouchSurfing references.

This paper deals with strategies for verbal complaints used by L2 and L1 speakers of English, and their comparative success. The analysis of complaints is conducted on the material of user references on the website CouchSurfing (CS), a platform for travellers who stay in each other’s houses and subsequently leave an honest reference about their experience for future ‘couchsurfers’. Opposed to other forms of online interaction, the producers of the collected data have therefore met personally before leaving their complaint on the CS system.

Although complaints have been discussed in various types of spoken discourse and computer-mediated communication, there is little empirical evidence on complaints based on informal or ordinary interaction outside of hospitality industry and service encounters. In addition, the analysis of an extremely important facet of the speech act of complaint - its perlocutionary force, has proven to be notoriously difficult in the absence of feedback from the addressee. The CS material allows to overcome this constraint by providing three extra dimensions of study: 1) rich demographic information about participants; 2) elicited response to every complaint, as the format of CS reference presupposes bilateral feedback; 3) metadiscursive comments by the complainer, i.e. the author’s own judgement about the degree of face-threat, expressed in the marking of the reference as negative/positive/neutral. It appears that success of complaints (i.e. elicitation of non-face-threatening response or an apology) depends less on internal modification and more on complaint perspective. Most negative responses to L2 speakers’ complaints were caused by their exclusive focus on complaint modification with hedges and modality markers. Thus, the study once again makes the case for the integration of pragmatic perspective into the EFL study, i.a. training learners in defocalizing reference in their complaints, as a prerequisite for successful communication in English.