“Ay no I do feel exhausted”: Affiliative practices and interpersonal relationships in indirect complaints in Spanish

Abstract

Indirect complaints, particularly situation-oriented and third-party-oriented, are a ubiquitous social action that speakers use to navigate trouble and build interpersonal relationships. Research has shown that affiliation constitutes the preferred response to this type of complaint and its absence can be treated as accountable. However, how different affiliative responses to complaints unveil existing and emergent relationship between participants has received limited attention. Drawing on interactional and interpersonal pragmatics, this study analyses how, in indirect complaints in Spanish, affiliation, nonaffiliation, disaffiliation, and selective affiliation reflect existing degrees of closeness between participants and affect their achievement of interactional intimacy. The data comes from phone conversations (from Talkbank) in Spanish between friends and relatives. The findings indicate that complainants recruit affiliation orienting to both the perceived degree of closeness in their existing relationships (e.g. claiming co-membership, common ground) and the interactional construction of intimacy through affective reciprocity. In the data, selective affiliation, a phenomenon where interactants co-complain but the elements with which they appear to affiliate trigger interactional misalignment, best illustrates this dual attention through subsequent interactional work. By exploring affiliative responses in complaining, this study contributes to the topic of complaints in Spanish and our understanding of how relationships are co-constructed in interaction.