How do you React to the Breakdown After it Happens? Do you Complain About it?: A Contrastive Study on the Complaint Behavior in American English and Persian

This study aims to compare American and Persian complaint realizations. Fifty five Persian university student's complaint utterances were collected via a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) containing eight scenarios and were later coded in terms of seven major categories: opting out, no explicit reproach, indirect complaint, indirect accusation, direct complaint, request for repair and threat. Participants were also interviewed after answering to DCT about their strategy use. General findings showed that Persian complaint realizations are significantly different from those of Americans. Also, findings indicated that Americans used more indirect complaint (IC) and request for repair (RR) but Persians preferred more direct complaint (DC) and indirect accusation (IA) strategies under identical circumstances. The qualitative findings reassured the quantitative results indicating that the speech act of complaint was realized differently through following different sociocultural norms.