COMPLAINT STRATEGIES AND FORMULAS IN CAMEROON FRENCH: A CASE STUDY

Authors

  • Bernard Mulo Farenkia Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v5i4.316

Keywords:

complaint strategies, complaint formulas, Cameroon French

Abstract

The present study examines the realization of complaints by Cameroonian French speakers. The data were collected, by means of discourse completion tasks (DCT) that was administered to 228 participants in Yaoundé and Douala, Cameroon. The examples were analyzed according to the following aspects: head act strategies (direct and indirect complaints) and external modifiers. With respect to head act strategies, the results show that the informants mostly preferred direct complaints in the form of expressions of disapproval and accusations, and indirect complaints in the form of expressions of disbelief and requests for repair. It was also found that the participants mostly used complex complaint utterances with a wide variety of pragmatic strategies and linguistic realizations. The analysis also reveals that the participants employed different types of external modifiers to soften or aggravate their complaints. These include preparatory acts such as exclamations, attention getters, address terms, etc., and supportive acts such as expressions of regrets, insistence acts, sarcasm, suggestions, etc. The strategies and formulas attested in the data seem to reflect the way in which Cameroon French speakers voice complaints in naturally occurring situations involving peer equality.

Author Biography

  • Bernard Mulo Farenkia, Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada
    The author is Full Professor of French and Linguistics at Cape Breton University, Canada. His main research interests include second / foreign language education, L2 French pragmatics, Language contact, Cross-cultural, Postcolonial, and Variational Pragmatics, Regional pragmatic variation in French.

References

Al-Khawaldeh, Nisreen (2016). A Pragmatic Cross-Cultural Study of Complaints Expressions in Jordan and England. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 5 (5), 197-207.

Anchimbe, Eric (2011). “Take a beer” – “Thanks, sorry, I prefer another day”: A postcolonial pragmatic perspective on offers and offer refusals. In Joachim Frenk & Lena Steveker (eds.), Anglistentag 2010 Saarbrücken Proceedings, 421–431. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.

Boxer, Diana (2010). Complaint: How to gripe and establish rapport. In A. Martínez Flor and E. Usó Juan (Eds.), Speech act performance: Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues. (pp. 163–178). Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins.

Boxer, D. (2010). Complaints: How to Gripe and Establish Rapport. In Martinez-Flor, A. &Uso-Juan, E. (2010). Speech Act Performance: Theoretical and Methodological Issues. co.

Boxer, D. (1993a). Complaining and Commiserating. A Speech Act View of Solidarity in Spoken American English. New York: Peter Lang.

Boxer, D. (1993). Social distance and speech behavior: The case of indirect complaints. Journal of Pragmatics, 19(2), 103-125.

Dersley, I. and Wootton, A. (2000). Complaint Sequences within Antagonistic Argument, Research on Language and Social Interaction 33: 375-406.

Drew, P. (1998). Complaints about Transgressions and Misconduct, Research on Language and Social Interaction 31: 295-325.

Essien Otung, Glory (2019). Campus Decorum: The realisation of apologies, complaints and requests by Nigerian and German students. M.A thesis, University of Bayreuth.

Geluykens R. & Kraft, B. (2003). Sociocultural variation in native and interlanguage complaints. In: K. Jaszcolt & K. Turner (Eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast (pp. 251-261). Amsterdam/New York: Benjamins.

Geluykens, R. & Bettina Kraft, B. (2006). Eine Kontrastive Analyse des Beschwerdeverhaltens in Deutsch und Französisch als Muttersprache und Lernersprache. Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Sprache und Sprachen, 33-34, 3-13.

Laforest, Marty (2002). Scenes of family life: Complaining in everyday conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 34 (10-11), 1595-1620.

Marchand, Ruben (2016). Kundenbeschwerden auf den Twitterprofilen der Deutschen Bahn und der SNCF: eine pragmatische und cross-kulturelle Analyse. Master’s Thesis. University of Gent.

Meinl, M. (2010). Electronic Complaints: An Empirical Study on British English and German Complaints on eBay. (Dissertation). University of Bonn.

Meyer, Katrin (2007). Interkulturelle Pragmatik: Aufforderungen, Entschuldigungen und Beschwerden. (Dissertation), University of Hamburg.

Murphy, B. & Neu, J. (1996). My grade's too low: The speech act set of complaining. In S. M. Gass and J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language, (191-216). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Ohlstain E. & Weinbach L. (1987). Complaints: a study on speech act behaviour among native and non-native speakers of Hebrew. In Bertucelli-Papi, Marcella and Verschueren, Jef (Eds.), The Pragmatic Perspective: Selected Papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Olshtain, E., & Weinbach, L. (1993). Interlanguage features of the speech act of complaining. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics (pp. 108-122). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Vasquez, C. (2011). Complaints online: The case of TripAdvisor. Journal of Pragmatics, 43 (6), 1707-1717.

Downloads

Published

2022-02-09

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 4 (2022)

Section

Articles