Oye, ¿qué onda con mi dinero?

Abstract

The objective of this study is to broaden the focus of pragmatic research to include the speech act of complaints produced by heritage speakers of Spanish. In addition to being a face-threatening act, the diverse ways in which complaints are expressed makes them a rich source for investigating how language use can vary across speech communities. Although there has been some research concerning contexts of intercultural communication, the pragmatic proficiency of heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States is an area that merits further investigation. In order to examine heritage speaker complaints, this study compares data from the following three groups: Mexican native speakers of Spanish (22), native speakers of English (40), and heritage speakers of Spanish (21). The heritage speakers and English native speakers in this study were undergraduate students at a large public university in California, while the native speakers of Spanish were university students in Mexico. All the participants completed an on-line Discourse Completion Test that included three complaint scenarios.