‘Espero su favorable respuesta.’ Expectations and complaints in L1 Japanese, L1 Portuguese L2 learners of Spanish
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Abstract
Areas of focus in intercultural pragmatics include examination of how interlocutors succeed in communicating messages and interpreting them from other interlocutors, interaction between native and non-native speakers, lingua franca communication, multilingual discourse, and language use by multilingual individuals (Kecskés, 2014, 2020). Kecskés (2014) lays foundational groundwork for this approach, focusing on dynamic systems of communication between interlocutors, guided by context, common ground, and salience, all of which are filtered through the experiences of the interlocutors. In dynamic oral discourses, this may lead to more pronounced L1 transference, but what about in written communication? In this modality, how can we expect L1 transference to appear in the production of complaints as speech acts?
Expressive speech acts, such as apologies and complaints (Searle, 1977), are characterized by the expression of a psychological state of the speaker regarding a specific event. Based on previous research on complaints across different modalities, complaints can take notably different forms, especially regarding their surrounding context. Expectations play a large role not only in native speaker production of complaints (Bolívar, 2002; Márquez-Reiter, 2005; Vásquez, 2011), but also in intercultural complaints (Gallaher, 2014; Tamanaha, 2003; Tokano, 1997). Drawing on a sociocognitive perspective, which highlights how learners process their L2 interactions through the lens of their past experiences with their L1 (Kecskés, 2014, 2020), similarities in L2 production can be explained by universal norms or the acquisition of L2 norms, whereas differences may be attributed to the influence of the learners’ L1. Examples of interlanguage complaints show signs of L1 transference, although proficiency seems to lessen this transference (Tamanaha, 2003). As such, the principal aim of this investigation is to examine the structuring of L2 Spanish complaints by speakers of differing L1s. Using data from the Corpus de aprendices del español (CAES, In English: Corpus of Spanish Learners) (Rojos & Palacios, 2022), a taxonomy of oral complaints (Tamanaha, 2003) will be used to initially analyze the speech act structure of complaints from computer delivered written discourse completion task (DCT) responses by L1 speakers of Japanese and Portuguese.
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