A cross-cultural study of complaint strategies by Macedonian and American high-school students

This cross-cultural study of the speech act of complaining in Macedonian and in American English aims to determine the differences and similarities of formulating complaints in the two languages with respect to complaint strategies. The analysis is based on the work of Trosborg (1995), Olshtain and Weinbach (1993), Haverkate (1998) and Wahyumi (2010). The data for the research were collected through an online Discourse Completion Task (DCT) consisting of eight hypothetical situations that elicit complaints. The used situations had different social and power distance between the interlocutors and different severity of offence. The participants were students at the Public Secondary School “Kole Nehtenin” located in Shtip, Macedonia, and students at the John Burroughs High School located in Burbank, California, USA. The research has indicated that there are some differences between the two languages in the strategy use, which may cause miscommunication. The findings of the research can help us understand the social values and relationships in the two languages, and they can also help us overcome the possible language barriers between the speakers of the Macedonian and the American community