Cross-cultural study of modifiers used in the speech act of complaining by American and Macedonian high-school students

The present study investigates the similarities and differences in the pragmatic structure of the speech act of complaining used by American and Macedonian high school students. The aim of the paper is to determine the pragmatic structure concerning the modifiers and herein to help EFL students in Macedonia to overcome the possible language barriers and future miscommunication. The study was carried out on an American English and Macedonian corpus gathered through an online Discourse completion task consisting of eight situations with different severity of offence (low, medium, high) and different vertical and horizontal distance between the interlocutors. The results showed the most common types of modifiers used in complaints in both language