“Ay no, I do feel exhausted”: Interactional co-construction and interpersonal management of complaints in Spanish phone conversations between friends and relatives
Abstract:
Complaining is a complex and ubiquitous social action in daily conversations in which speakers use language to navigate through everyday trouble and build interpersonal
relationships. Previous research has identified and explored how two main categories of complaints, i.e. direct and indirect, are co-constructed to achieve different interpersonal effects (Heinemann & Traverso, 2009). Although the growing interest in complaints has engendered studies in multiple languages other than English (e.g. German, French, Danish), research in Spanish, for example, remains limited to institutional settings mostly. This study fills this gap and aims to (1) systematically explore how different types of complaints are co-constructed in casual interactions in Spanish, and (2) examine how degrees of intimacy between participants emerge from their affiliative practices in complaining. The data comes from two corpora (CallFriend and CallHome) and comprises nearly 9.5 hours of audio-recorded phone conversations in Spanish between friends and family members. The analysis draws on interactional pragmatics to examine in detail the emergent sequential practices associated with interpersonal relationships (Haugh, 2012;
Haugh, forthcoming). The findings indicate that recipient-oriented and self-oriented complaints occur considerably less frequently than situation-oriented and third-partyoriented complaints in the corpus. A detailed turn-by-turn analysis shows that complaints in Spanish, as in other languages (Selting, 2010; Rääbis et al., 2019), are prosodically emphasized, lexically detailed through extreme case formulations, and syntactically presented as complaint implicatives through questions. It also demonstrates that some language-specific markers such as oye, mira, and ay often appear at the beginning of bounded complaint sequences, epistemic negotiations, and
emotional stances. Sequentially, complaints are co-constructed through denials, non-serious frames, assessment escalations, advice sequences, affiliative complaints, and epistemic negotiations. The resulting interactional patterns unveil different degrees of intimacy and affiliation expectations between the participants. Remarkably, while (non) (dis)affiliation are frequent patterns in the corpus, selective affiliation, a term used here to describe affiliative expectation mismatches, constitutes a salient practice when interactants share the role of the complainant through affiliative complaints or co-complaining. In relation to intimacy, selective affiliation often signals distance between the interactants and also attempts to achieve in-group membership. By exploring casual talk in Spanish, this systematic analysis of complaints contributes to the under-explored area of how complaining is coconstructed and accomplished in interaction.
Citación recomendada (normas APA)
Andrea Giovanna Rodríguez Ortega, "“Ay no, I do feel exhausted”: Interactional co-construction and interpersonal management of complaints in Spanish phone conversations between friends and relatives", Colombia:-, 2021. Consultado en línea en la Biblioteca Digital de Bogotá (https://www.bibliotecadigitaldebogota.gov.co/resources/3711601/), el día 2025-05-09.
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Contestación que el Concejo Municipal de Antioquia da a los insultos que se le prodigan en el papel titulado Representación al Supremo Gobierno, y firmado Fray Mariano Obispo de Antioquia
