Politeness strategies in the speech act of complaining by students in a university in central Vietnam
Abstract
This study investigates pragma-linguistic strategies in the categorical dimension of positive politeness and negative politeness employed by university students when performing the speech act of complaining in their everyday communicative situations. Data were collected using a discourse completion task (DCT) administered to 30 first-year non-English majors at a university in central Vietnam (QNU). The complaining utterances collected were analyzed to find out the politeness strategies employed. The findings reveal the use of both politeness strategy systems, with positive politeness strategies being more prominent in order to maintain harmony and resolve complaint issues. The distribution of politeness strategies reflects the participants’ sensitivity to contextual factors. The study provides empirical evidence of the uneven distribution in the choice of politeness strategies for a particular speech act, highlighting the influence of communicative factors such as topic, power relations, and social distance between interlocutors on strategy selection. In addition, the findings carry implications for the training and development of pragmatic competence in language/ foreign language teaching and learning.