The current study investigates whether and how Turkish learners of English (TLEs) transfer pragmatic knowledge from their native language into English when performing the speech act of complaining. 3000 written responses collected from TLEs and native speakers of both English (ENSs) and Turkish (TNSs) via a ten-item discourse completion task were analyzed. The study revealed that (1) requests, hints, and annoyance were the most commonly-used strategies by all three groups; (2) TLEs used the strategies hints, ill consequences, direct accusation, and threats/warnings at frequencies that were closer to the ENSs’ frequencies; (3) the TLEs, ENSs and TNSs were statistically indistinguishable in their use of annoyance, blame (behavior), and blame (person), and finally (4) the TLEs used modified blame at an intermediate level with respect to the ENSs and the TNSs, reflecting weak negative pragmatic transfer.

The current study investigates whether and how Turkish learners of English (TLEs) transfer pragmatic knowledge from their native language into English when performing the speech act of complaining. 3000 written responses collected from TLEs and native speakers of both English (ENSs) and Turkish ...