COMPLAINTS ABOUT COVID: An Examination of the Structure and Properties of Complaints about COVID-19 Using Conversation Analysis

Abstract

In making a complaint, speakers attach a negative assessment to a person, an entity, or an event. Verbalizing such an assessment in interaction transforms a previously individual perception into one that they consider suitable to be negotiated with their interlocutors (Emerson & Messinger, 1977). Complaint recipients, on the other hand, can choose to support the assessment on an affective level or not (dis/affiliation) and to correspond with the complaint by producing structurally fitting responses (dis/alignment) (Pomerantz, 1975). Building on studies of complaints in English, French and Finnish, this thesis examines complaints in naturally occurring German conversation, specifically ones about COVID-19-related matters, using the method of Conversation Analysis. Data stem from the Leibniz Institute for the German Language’s Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Deutsch (FOLK) and feature exclusively private telephone call interactions made between March 2020 and February 2021. From those, a collection of 25 complaint sequences was assembled. By means of the collection and eight detailed qualitative analyses of different complaint negotiations, the thesis examines the following research questions: 1) Which linguistic resources are employed by speakers to place complaint-initial first assessments? 2) How do recipients express and negotiate dis/agreement, in light of a conversational preference for agreement (Sacks, 1987; Auer & Uhmann, 1982)? 3) To what extent do speakers orient to their complaints and responses as potentially problematic or delicate (Jefferson, 1985)? Findings reveal speakers’ orientation to the delicacy of both placing and receiving complaints: Speakers draw on a variety of lexico-semantic, syntactic, prosodic and paralinguistic features to index the potentially problematic nature of complaining and formulate complaints in a way that they pose minimal threat to their own and others’ face (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Furthermore, disagreement in the form of disaffiliating second-position responses only rarely occurs and tends to be introduced implicitly. This confirms findings on complaints in other languages. Two new insights can be taken away from this thesis: Complaining speakers produce complaints about events using the same constitutive components as in complaints about people; describing the negative impact on themselves and blaming a third party for it. With respect to complaining about COVID-19-related events, a tendency towards implicitness regarding both components can be observed. With a broader scope and regarding the underlying social dynamics of interaction, it could be found that joint complaint activities about jointly experienced circumstances (such as COVID-19) seem to be pursued as a means of cultivating social relationships and solidarity, which is indicated, among other things, by the use of membership categories to signal connectedness.