The Speech Act of Complaint by Iranian Students in University Contexts

The purpose of this study is to determine the ways by which Iranian students indirectly complain about an unfavorable situation. Besides, this study aims at investigating the major social strategies used by Iranian students to respond to indirect complaints. Data were collected from spontaneous speech, most of which was audio-recorded naturally occurring in university contexts. Taking ideas from the categorizations put forward by Boxer (1993), the encoded relevant excerpts of the data were categorized into some themes as initiating moves and some categories as responses. The findings revealed that in order to capture all of the strategies used by Iranian students to initiate and respond to indirect complaints the existing categorizations need to be modified. It was also revealed that gender plays a significant role in the type of strategies used when initiating or responding to indirect complaints. A detailed discussion of the findings and suggestions for further research are presented. This study illuminates some aspects of the pragmatics of Persian language.

Keywords:

speech act of complaint , indirect complaint , face