A cross-cultural comparison of complaints

Complaining is a universal language act present in most languages. However, its universality does not mean equal linguistic expression nor structure. Hence, this research analyses the speech act of complaining in American English and Macedonian. The participants are university students divided in two sample groups. One group involves native speakers of American English and the other sample group are native speakers of Macedonian. The data was gathered by an anonymous online questionnaire. A quantitative and qualitative analysis was applied, specifically in identifying the strategies used to express a complaint, the applied perspective and modifiers within the complaint. The quantitative results helped detect the general linguistic pattern of a complaint in the two languages, while the qualitative analysis helped to correlate the social and contextual features of the complaints with their linguistic features in American English and Macedonian. The main aim of the research is to raise awareness of foreign language learners and native speakers on the cultural influence over speech realization patterns.