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Going too far: complaining, escalating and disaffiliation

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journal contribution
posted on 2013-10-02, 08:48 authored by Paul Drew, Traci Walker
This report, arising from a study of affiliation and disaffiliation in interaction, addresses an apparently ‘anomalous’ finding in relation to complaint sequences in conversation. In some of the cases we collected in which one speaker was complaining on behalf of the other (their co-participant), taking her side in some matter, the one on whose behalf the other was complaining did not affiliate with the complaint. Instead they resisted the complaint (again, one made on their behalf) and demurred to ‘go so far’. This finding is anomalous in the sense that if A is complaining on behalf of B, in respect of some harm done to B, then it might be expected that B would go along with the complaint, and affiliate with A. To account for how it might come about that B demurs from ‘going as far as’ A, we explore how complaints are frequently introduced in conversation. We show that complaints may emerge through a progression in which ‘the complainant’ does not initially go on record with a complaint, but instead secures the other's participation in co-constructing the complaint. Hence the ‘complaint recipient’ may be the first to make the complaint explicit, in a sequence of escalating affiliation. In the ‘anomalous’ cases, it appears that this escalation goes too far for the putative complainant (B).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Citation

DREW, P. and WALKER, T., 2009. Going too far: complaining, escalating and disaffiliation. Journal of Pragmatics, 41 (12), pp. 2400 - 2414.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2009

Notes

This article was published in the Journal of Pragmatics [© Elsevier B.V.] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.046

ISSN

0378-2166

Language

  • en