AN ANALYSIS OF THE SPEECH ACT OF COMPLAINT IN ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA (ELF): A DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC STUDY OF A CORPUS FROM TRIPADVISOR

2021-9
Demir, Nur Yağmur
The main purpose of this study is to explore the strategies that English as Lingua Franca (ELF) users prefer while performing the speech act of complaint in a specific computer-mediated communication (CMC) context— focusing on online reviews of a popular travel platform called TripAdvisor. In accordance with this purpose, a corpus (approximately 340,000 words) consisting of 1810 complaints written by complainers, who claim to be in several various cities all around the world, was compiled within a certain sampling frame. Based on their claimed locations, the complainers in the study are categorized according to Kachru’s World Englishes model. In order to identify the complaint strategies performed by ELF users and statistically compare strategic discrepancies among complainer groups, a mixed method data analysis was employed. The qualitative analysis was conducted with the help of a coding scheme which was developed based on the available complaint strategy taxonomies in literature and a qualitative data analysis tool. This analysis yielded the frequencies of strategies applied by complainers. For the quantitative analysis part, Pearson’s chi square test was employed to these frequencies to reveal statistical similarities and differences. The findings of this study are believed to shed light on 3 important linguistic fields which have not been thoroughly investigated in the literature yet (ELF, CMC, speech act of complaint) and put forward some practical implications regarding the teaching of speech act of complaints in English.

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Citation Formats
N. Y. Demir, “AN ANALYSIS OF THE SPEECH ACT OF COMPLAINT IN ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA (ELF): A DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC STUDY OF A CORPUS FROM TRIPADVISOR,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2021.