Realization of the Complaint Speech Act in Spoken Arabic and English among Saudi Female English Majors at Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University

Abstract

The core goal of this study is to investigate complaint speech act conducted in English and Arabic by Saudi female English majors at Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The sample of this study involves 30 undergraduate students of English at level eight. In order to collect data for this study, the subjects are given a controlled elicitation technique named “a Discourse Completion Test (DCT)”. The test comprises two versions; Arabic and English. Each version consists of nine situations denoting the speech act of complaint to which the subjects are required to respond as naturally as they can without spending much time thinking of what to say. After that, the data are analyzed based on the classification system of complaint strategies developed by Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) and DeCapua (1998). Two more new strategies have been added by the present researcher. Moreover, the study compared and contrasted complaint patterns in English and Arabic as expressed by these subjects. These patterns are analyzed using frequencies and percentages of their occurrence as well as the Chi-square test. The results of this study indicate that the social statuses like power, which affect the realization patterns of complaint, seem to be universal. Saudi female English majors tend to change their complaint behavior according to the social variables of the situation. Those subjects tend to be more direct when composing complaints in higher to lower relations and in equal relations and more polite and indirect when a complainee has dominance over a complainer. The results of the presents study revealed that Saudi female English majors should have enhanced awareness of cultural and linguistic discrepancies in order to express the speech act of complaint in English appropriately, making use of complaint strategies that are based on English speaking norms.