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 212 university students divided in two sample groups. One group involves
native speakers of American English from San Diego, California, and the other sample group are native speakers of Macedonian from Shtip, North Macedonia. The data was
gathered by an anonymous online questionnaire that included three speech situations with
different topic and different social parameters. 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 research succeeds in determining the similarities and differences of complaints in both languages, and concludes that similarities outnumber the differences. 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.