Pragmatic aspects of making and responding to complaints in an intercultural university context

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The broad topic of this study is the nature and the effects of making and interpreting complaintsin intercultural interactions involving international students and South African administrativestaff in two Stellenbosch University residences. It appears that during these interactions, theinternational students are often frustrated by the way their complaints are handled. As a speechact, the effectiveness of a complaint depends on the way it is expressed and understood and alsoon the social context in which it is performed. In this regard, the study examines the influence ofcultural differences on the way complaints are made and responded to in the above-mentionedintercultural interactions. The study aims to analyse intercultural situations involving the makingand understanding of complaints that may result in misunderstandings.The complaints data were collected through a discourse completion task, performed by 24international students belonging to six cultural groups, namely American, Chinese, Dutch,Gabonese, German and Libyan. All the students were residents in one of two student residencesof Stellenbosch University. The social acceptability judgments data were elicited from threeAfrikaans-speaking South African staff members of these residences, and from an additional sixAfrikaans-speaking South African students who served as informants. All the data were analyzedwithin the pragmatic framework of the CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act RealizationProject), as developed by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989).The main findings of the analysis indicate that the six cultural groups differed in the way theymade their complaints. Moreover, these differences influenced the manner in which somecomplaints were understood by the staff members. It was also found that the staff members'responses to the complaints were influenced by their social acceptability judgments of theinternational students' utterances. These findings lead to three main conclusions: (i) the way inwhich complaints are made and understood is influenced by factors that relate to culturaldifferences; (ii) such cultural differences may lead to misunderstandings; and (iii) consciousefforts to create greater awareness of cultural differences will lead to a better understanding ofthe way in which people of different cultural groups make and respond to complaints.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University