Complaining and Commiserating

This book provides an in-depth ethnographic analysis of the social functions of indirect complaints (ICs) and commiserative responses as they are used among speakers of American English and one group of Japanese learners of American English. The speech acts of complaining and commiserating are analysed as a function of the sociolinguistic variables of gender, social distance and relative social status.
Indirect complaints were found to be ubiquitous in the ordinary conversation of the native speakers studied. The vast majority of IC exchanges were found to establish solidarity between interlocutors based on a shared view.