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Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1595–1620 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Scenes of family life: complaining in everyday conversation§ Marty Laforest De´partement de franc¸ais, Universite´ du Que´bec a` Trois-Rivie`res, C.P. 500, Trois-Rivie`res (Qc), Canada G9A 5H7 Abstract The purpose of this study...

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Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1595–1620 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Scenes of family life: complaining in everyday conversation§ Marty Laforest De´partement de franc¸ais, Universite´ du Que´bec a` Trois-Rivie`res, C.P. 500, Trois-Rivie`res (Qc), Canada G9A 5H7

Abstract The purpose of this study is to characterize the complaint/complaint-response sequence in everyday conversations between people who are on intimate terms. More specifically, the intent is to examine the form taken by the complaint and the form of the response elicited from the hearer, and to bring out the relation between the complaint as an act and the argument as a genre of conversation. The complaints analyzed, taken from a corpus of family conversations recorded in Montre´al, have preferential realization patterns that can be linked in part to the intimacy of the relationship between the interactants: In many ways, they are uttered without the special precautions generally associated with face-threatening acts. The complainees most often reject the blame leveled at them. But well characterized arguments are virtually absent from the corpus. The entry into the argument is negotiated in the speech turns that follow the complaint/response sequence, and the argument only breaks out if the complainer questions the value of the complainee’s response. Both interactants use numerous strategies for avoiding an argument and, more often than not, they succeed. The strategies they use can be seen as indicators of the status of verbal confrontation in the Que´bec community. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Argument; Complaint; Conflict; Conversation; Culture; Pragmatics

§

This study, which is part of broader research into the negotiation of meaning in talk-in-interaction, was made possible through the financial support of Que´bec’s Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide a` la recherche (FCAR) and of the Universite´ du Que´bec a` Trois-Rivie`res. I would like to thank Karine Blanchette for helping me gather the complaints analyzed, Denise Deshaies and Guylaine Martel for sharing their thoughts on some of the issues raised here, Diane Vincent and Malcah Yaeger-Dror for their stimulating comments on an earlier version of the text, and also Mark Dobbie for translating the original French manuscript into English. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Laforest). 0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(02)00077-2

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1. Introduction Complaining is one way of reminding a person that there are certain norms of behavior which must not be transgressed. The interlocutors, who give us the most frequent opportunities for evaluating their behavior, are the people closest to us, because close, ongoing relations are those in which sorting out the norms of behavior to be shared is a vital concern. In such a context, observing the interactional and discursive effect of complaining on the basis of how it is done can yield an assessment of where complaining fits in among the strategies speakers of a given community use to do the sorting out. The purpose of this study is to characterize the complaint/complaint-response sequence in everyday conversations between people who are on intimate terms. More specifically, the intent is: 1. to examine the more or less direct form taken by the complaint and the form of the response elicited from the complainee; 2. to evaluate the impact of the complaint on the conversation, i.e., the possible discursive continuations of the complaint/complaint-response sequence, which will make it possible to bring out the relation between the complaint as an act and the scene or argument as a type of conversation.

2. The act of complaining For the purposes of this study, complaint is defined as an expression of dissatisfaction addressed by an individual A to an individual B concerning behavior on the part of B that A feels is unsatisfactory. The complaint is addressed to the person identified as the cause of the problem, i.e., the individual responsible for the behavior that is deemed unsatisfactory.1 What I mean by unsatisfactory behavior is behavior that violates social norms and fails to meet the expectations the complainer has regarding his or her relationship with the complainee (see Goffman, 1971). Hence, failure to meet expectations is a precondition for the implementation of the act of complaining. It is interesting to note that the Petit Robert dictionary definition of the word reproche (‘reproach’) includes the function of complaining, or, if one prefers, its perlocutionary intent. The definition says—and I’m translating here—that reproach is ‘‘blame leveled at someone [...] to make them feel shame or regret, or to make them change their ways’’ (emphasis added). In the context of speech act and discourse analysis theory, the act of complaining is neither easy to define nor easy to talk about. Complaint is among the facethreatening acts (FTAs) as defined by Brown and Levinson (1987); accordingly, it 1 Thus, I am not dealing with cases of complaining to a person about the conduct of others. It is important to point this out, because the meaning of the term ‘complaint’ is broader than that of the French term ‘reproche’, used in the original version of this article, which refers only to dissatisfaction addressed to the person held to be responsible for deviant behavior.

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comes at a high social price, which the complainer generally tries to evaluate. More specifically, complaint figures among the FTAs that ‘‘threaten [. . .] positive-face want’’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 66) by indicating, at least potentially, that the speaker’s wishes do not correspond to those of the hearer, just like disapproval, criticism, reprimands, accusations, insults, etc. Like all FTAs, complaint is generally (more or less) indirect in form. It is all the more difficult to capture theoretically, given that there is no prototype of it, as there is for the request or the excuse. In context, complaint is very difficult to distinguish from the related acts mentioned above, which are likely to appear at the same time and to elicit similar reactions. While Brown and Levinson seem to regard acts of disapproval, complaint, criticism, accusation, etc. as distinct from one another, such acts actually overlap, and it is not easy (and may be not necessarily that useful) to distinguish very clearly between them, as can be seen in various studies devoted to the phenomenon being addressed here. What I am calling complaint is entitled ‘‘disapproval exchange’’ by D’Amico-Reisner (1983), and ‘‘complaining speech act’’ by Olshtain and Weinbach (1993). It includes disapproval, accusation, warning, and threatening. From an interactional standpoint, if we take the complaint as the first part of an adjacency pair, there is no typical corresponding second part: the complaint can be followed by denial, rejection, justification, making excuses, etc. According to Edmondson (1981: 280), the reason for this is that ‘‘in Austinian terms, the ‘‘perlocutionary intent’’ of a complaint is negotiable: a hearer cannot be said to recognize by convention what behavior will satisfy the complaint’’. Given that the complaint has all these characteristics, discerning its presence in conversations is a delicate matter. That is why, in this study, like Olshtain and Weinbach (1993) and Olshtain and Cohen (1983), I have considered all FTAs used to express dissatisfaction with what is deemed to be unsatisfactory behavior by an interactant, without attempting to draw distinctions between them. According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 65), an act is recognizable as ‘‘what is intended to be done by a verbal and a non-verbal communication’’. But the intention is beyond the grasp of the receiver of the act and (even more so) that of the analyst. Many assertive utterances corresponding to the intention to complain can always be interpreted as simple comments. Conversely, many innocent observations — reflecting the intention to take note of something — can be taken to be complaints (as can be seen in the examples analyzed by Schegloff, 1987). As we know, the lack of correspondence between the intention attributed to the speaker and the speaker’s true intention (insofar as he or she is actually aware of it) is not necessarily made manifest in a subsequent speaking turn such as ‘don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean’ or ‘I wasn’t complaining’. Adopting (for the purposes of analysis) the point of view of the hearer, I considered as a complaint anything the speaker said that the hearer took to be an expression of dissatisfaction with his/her behavior. I therefore extracted everything that elicited any of the reactions associated with FTAs in the same family as complaint such as excuse, bravado, denial, justification, etc., (see detailed list below). Since one of those possible reactions is to ignore FTA, and since ignoring does not always make it possible to know whether the hearer perceived disapproval in the

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speaker’s words, I deduced that a complaint was present in such cases if the ignored utterance contained strong prosodic characteristics associated with disapproval or if there was, at a later point in the discourse, any kind of indicator that the intention to complain was inherent in the speaker’s utterance.

3. Data The data for this study are taken from the Montre´al 1995 corpus, which consists of about 50 hours of family conversations recorded at home by four French-speaking Montre´al families. The recordings were performed with the consent of the participants while the researchers were not present.2 According to the informants, the recorded interactions are fairly representative of their daily life. Only complaints addressed by a speaker to a peer (by a member of a couple to his/her partner, in the vast majority of cases, or by an individual to his/her brother or sister) were taken into consideration. The complaints exchanged between people who are not peers (parents and children, notably) were eliminated in order to neutralize the factor of variation introduced by a difference in hierarchical position between interactants.3 The number of occurrences gathered — 50 — is relatively small for such a large quantity of data, and in comparison with other studies on the subject, which most often have used different data-gathering methodologies. But the complaints in this study appeared ‘naturally’, so to speak, not being the result of an imposed situation, whether it be role playing (as in Newell and Stutman, 1989/1990) or responding to a discourse completion test (as in Beebe and Takahashi, 1989; Hartley, 1996; Olshtain and Weinbach, 1993, among others). The other disadvantage of working with a corpus, apart from the small number of occurrences gathered, is, of course, the heterogeneous nature of the acts for which hearers are blamed: with naturallyoccurring complaints, we have no control over the factors which can influence the form they take. The difficulty of gathering complaints and their heterogeneous nature no doubt explain why natural conversations have rarely been used for the type of analysis proposed here (the interesting studies by D’Amico-Reisner (1983) and by Dersley and Wootton (2000) are, to my knowledge, among the few that have been done). But a corpus of true conversations is not without its advantages. It allows us: 1. to observe complaining in an interactional context that is broader and often more surprising, because the complaints gathered are not dependent on a situation imagined by the analyst in advance; 2

From an ethical standpoint, I feel that recordings made without the speakers’ consent are unacceptable. It is hard to assess to what extent informants are inhibited by the presence of the tape recorder. However, we tried to use a data gathering procedure that would minimize this factor as much as possible (routine recordings, spread over several days, etc., –– see Vincent et al., 1995). 3 In the case of parent–child conversations, there is another factor at work, which can change the possible interpretation of the complaint: since the parent’s job consists precisely in inculcating norms of behavior, complaints and interventions with ‘educational’ intentions largely overlap (on this topic, see Blum-Kulka, 1997, Chapter 5).

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M. Laforest / Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1595–1620 Table 1 Dyads of speakers Dyad

Approx. agea (him/her)

Social class

Years of living together (approx.)

Normand and Marie Paul and Christine Paul and his sister Nicolas and Luce Steve and Nathalie Charles and France

Mid-forties/47 50/32 50/? Mid-forties/48 21/21 46/mid-forties

Lower middle class Working class Working class Lower middle class Lower middle class Upper middle class

17 12 – 24 1 20

a For reasons inherent in the way the ‘Montre´al 19950 corpus was constituted, we generally know the specific age of only one member of each couple.

2. to observe the true influence of the constraints related to face management, because the complaints are uttered in a context where things are truly at stake (given that the interactants have a continuing relationship).

Such a corpus is very hard to come by, but this difficulty is counterbalanced by the fact that it has a much better chance of reflecting what people actually do in real life, and is therefore much more trustworthy than artificially elicited pragmatic data. The complaints gathered are from 15 distinct interactions involving five dyads who are spouses and one brother/sister dyad (see Table 1). All social classes are represented. Four of the five couples of spouses have been living together for several years. The daughter of one of those couples and her boyfriend constitute the fifth couple of spouses. They both live with their parents, but spend a lot of time with the young woman’s family. They have been together for about a year.

4. Analysis 4.1. Distribution and nature of the complaints in the corpus As can be seen in Table 2, the complaints gathered are unequally distributed among the conversations in which they appear and much more concentrated in those involving certain dyads. As we will see, however, a heavy concentration of complaints does not necessarily indicate the presence of a conflictual interaction. Another characteristic of the conversations observed is that one member of the couple utters nearly all of the complaints (as we will see later, counterattacks are rare). The results do not show, however, that either sex has recourse to complaints more than the other: when behavior is sharply asymmetrical, the person who does practically all the complaining is in some couples the man, in others the woman. The

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Table 2 Distribution of complaints in the corpus Dyad

Normand and Marie Paul and Christine Paul and his sister Nicolas and Luce Steve and Nathalie Charles and France Total

Total duration of interactions (min)

His complaints

Her complaints

Total number of complaints

1 6 1 1 2 4

25 187 9 12 34 141

1 15 2 – 1 3

1 2 – 1 16 8

2 17 2 1 17 11

15

408

22

28

50

Interactions containing complaints

asymmetry could just as well be explained by a power dynamics typical of each couple.4 The everyday conversations recorded with the speakers’ consent turned up few complaints with serious reasons behind them, and, in any case, serious reasons for complaining are necessarily more rare than others. Thus, in the corpus under study, the reasons for complaining that are given are, as could be expected, extremely mundane, completely typical of shared daily life. The partner is blamed for endlessly repeating a desire to be taken out somewhere the complainer doesn’t want to go, for sneezing inelegantly, for forgetting something on the table that should have gone into the fridge, or for occupying the bathroom for too long in the morning. It is plausible that the seriousness of the offence influences the response by the complainee, but the data analyzed provide no means of evaluating this influence. 4.2. Classification of complaints Classifications of complaint realization patterns vary depending on the breadth of the conceptual framework used to capture the complaint phenomenon (including or excluding FTAs in the same family), on the formality of the situations giving rise to the complaint and on the variety of the relations (in terms of power and familiarity) between the complainer and the complainee. Like Olshtain and Weinbach (1987, 1993), and Hartley (1996) as well, I feel there is a speech act set of complaining composed of distinct realization patterns (which may be combined5) that can be drawn upon in order to formulate a complaint.

4 Also, the data are too fragmentary for a link to be established between the quantity or the nature of the complaints uttered and how long the members of each couple have been in their relationship or which social class they belong to. 5 They are rarely combined in the corpus I used, however. I found only two complaint interventions consisting of two combined patterns. Each of them was counted as a single complaint and placed in the dominant category of realization pattern (see definitions of categories), i.e., the most explicit one (which, in both instances, was the category of mentioning the offensive act or behavior).

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Table 3 Complaint realization patterns Situation: It’s 11 p.m. X and Y are in the kitchen. X has just noticed that the bread bag is empty. Complaint realization pattern Example a. Allusion to an offensive act b. Justification of discontent c. Request that the complainee justify his/her offensive act d. Mentioning the offensive act e. Requesting a change in behavior f. Adverse criticism of the hearer

X: There’s no bread left. X: I’m gonna have to get up earlier again tomorrow morning to go to the bakery! X: How come you ate all the bread? X: You ate all the bread! X: Hey, do you think you could manage to leave some bread for breakfast? X: You never think about others!

These realization patterns, of which there are six,6 are defined and/or illustrated below with examples from the corpus. Table 3 presents the full spectrum of patterns, seeking to clarify them by using imaginary prototypical examples based on a single situation. So we have: a. allusion to the offensive act/behavior (without explicit mention of that act/ behavior and without calling into question the complainee). Typical form: an assertive utterance with no evaluation or second person markers: (1) Paul’s sister phones him on March 31. After exchanging hellos, Paul says: C’est le 30 ma feˆte, moi. My birthday’s on the 30th. b. justification of discontent (i.e., any utterance intended to show that the speaker is justified in protesting about the act/behavior being criticized. The utterance most often expresses the result or consequences of the offensive act for the...