Mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints in L2 settings

Abstract

Sometimes we face material or practical troubles that require assistance from others to be resolved. While assistance can be mobilized through requests for assistance, it can also be mobilized through complaints. However, while L2 requests have been the object of numerous studies, there has been very little work examining how complaints can be used by L2 speakers to mobilize assistance. In this article, we examine how troubles-complaints are used by Saudi L2 speakers of English as a method by which to mobilize assistance. It is suggested that mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints provides for the negotiation of the material and moral contingencies associated with any such assistance. It is also suggested that the mobilization of requests through complaints is preferred over requests for assistance when the nature of assistance and who will provide it needs to be negotiated. Leading with requests for assistance in such cases thus occasions interactional misalignment. We conclude that the learning and teaching of pragmatic competence needs to go beyond traditional sets of speech acts such as requests.

Introduction

In everyday life, things can sometimes go wrong. We may have purchased a defective product, the neighbours may be excessively noisy, or we may have moved into a rental property that has not been appropriately maintained. In such cases, we need assistance from others to resolve those troubles. Assistance to resolve material or practical troubles can come in many forms. Sometimes it can involve showing empathy (Jin et al. 2021) or giving advice (Bloch and Antaki 2019), while in other cases it may involve offering practical assistance. When seeking practical assistance to resolve troubles it might be assumed that we need to make a request of some sort. Indeed, a lot of attention in applied linguistics has been devoted to studying how L2 users (learn to) make requests (Al-Gahtani and Roever 2012, 2015; Taguchi and Kim 2016), as part of the broader development of pragmatic or interactional competence in the target language in question (Kasper 2001; Pekarek Doehler 2019; Roever and Ikeda 2024). A growing number of these studies have demonstrated that L2 speakers are not simply learning the different linguistic formats that can be used when making requests (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984; Taguchi and Kim 2016), but also the various sequential procedures associated with making requests for assistance in the target language in question (Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010; Al-Gahtani and Roever 2012).

However, making requests is not the only way in which we can mobilize assistance from others. One ‘method’ of mobilizing assistance that has received little attention to date in studies of L2 speakers is making complaints. Complaints, broadly speaking, involve expressing ‘feelings of discontent about some state of affairs, for which responsibility can be attributed to “someone” (to some person, organization or the like)’ (Heinemann and Traverso 2009: 2381). In some cases, however, expressing discontent about troubles, or what we term ‘troubles-complaints’, is not designed to hold the recipient necessarily culpable for that complainable state of affairs, but rather to hold the recipient responsible for remedying those troubles. Unlike requests for assistance, which generally specify a particular solution or remedy as well as who is responsible for providing that remedy (Kendrick and Drew 2016), thereby making the granting or declining of that request conditionally relevant (Sacks 1992), one cannot directly comply with or decline a complaint. Instead, the mobilization of assistance through troubles-complaints affords the negotiation of potential remedies for troubles and responsibilities for providing the agreed-upon remedy. Mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints is thus an interactional practice by which participants seeking to resolve troubles make relevant the provision of remedies, but do not explicitly specify a particular remedy or who is necessarily responsible for providing that remedy. This raises questions as to how troubles-complaints are used by L2 speakers to mobilize assistance, what is accomplished through mobilizing assistance in this way, and what occasions interactional (mis)alignment in the mobilization of assistance through troubles-complaints in L2 settings.

In this article, we examine how troubles-complaints are designed to mobilize assistance, as studies of L2 speakers seeking assistance have, to date, focused on requests, with little, if any, research on the role of complaints in mobilizing assistance. The data under scrutiny were gathered from encounters in which Saudi speakers of English as an additional language studying in Australia attempted to mobilize assistance through troubles-complaints. In focusing on how L2 speakers of English mobilize assistance through troubles-complaints, we are presuming that it is important to understand the methods by which proficient L2 speakers navigate social interaction in order to resolve real world troubles.

In what follows, we begin by first briefly reviewing prior research on requests and complaints, before going on to describe the data and method that underpins this study. The results of our analysis of the mobilization of assistance by L2 speakers through troubles-complaints is reported in two parts. We first examine how assistance is mobilized through troubles-complaints across various institutional settings by Saudi L2 speakers of English, and consider what is accomplished through mobilizing assistance in that way. We next consider the extent to which the pragmatic well-formedness of the turn and sequential design of those troubles-complaints—as well as what leads into and follows them—can result in interactional (mis)alignment. Our analysis suggests that mobilizing assistance through complaints appears to be preferred over requests for assistance in instances where responsibility for providing assistance needs to be negotiated by the participants, and that interactional misalignment is occasioned when L2 speakers implement requests for assistance in such cases. The implications of these findings for research on L2 pragmatic competence more broadly are then considered.

Background

Prior work on requests

There are a growing number of studies in conversation analysis (CA) and pragmatics that focus on the ways in which assistance may be sought (Drew and Couper-Kuhlen 2014). Such work has shown that not only the format but also the sequential design of requests and related actions is important for them to be recognized and acted upon by co-participants. It has been demonstrated that requests do not simply occur out of the blue in the form of single isolated utterances, for instance, but are often sequentially worked up through various methods by which participants can orient to the moral and spatio-temporal contingencies of the request in question (Schegloff 2007; Curl and Drew 2008).

There is also a growing body of work on requests in L2 settings. Such work has traditionally focused on the syntactic form of those requests (see Al-Gahtani and Roever 2015 for a useful overview). However, in recent years there have also been a number of studies of L2 requests that draw on CA methods in examining the sequential organization of (extended) request sequences, including in L2 Arabic (Al-Gahtani and Roever 2014a, 2014b; Roever and Al-Gahtani 2015), L2 English (Kidwell 2000; Al-Gahtani and Roever 2012; Routarinne and Ahlholm 2021), and L2 German (Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010). Al-Gahtani and Roever (2012) demonstrated in their study of L2 requests produced by Saudi speakers of English, for instance, that variation in the degree of proficiency of L2 speakers in producing requests is not simply a matter of using the appropriate linguistic form for making a request but also entails the speaker being able to lay the normatively expected sequential groundwork for that request through providing accounts and checking the availability of their interlocutor, thereby projecting an upcoming request. Notably, higher proficiency learners in Al-Gahtani and Rover’s (2012) study were able to successfully accomplish that sequential groundwork, while lower proficiency L2 speakers generally did not. Similar findings have been replicated in studies of L2 requests in other languages (Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010; Su and Ren 2017; Routarinne and Ahlholm 2021).

Overall, this body of research has demonstrated that requests for assistance not only involve L2 speakers producing appropriate grammatical forms but doing so in ways that are sequentially fitted to the overall interactional trajectory of the encounter in question. However, most studies to date have only focused on requests, and have not considered other alternative methods of mobilizing assistance.

Prior work on complaints

As complaints involve expressing feelings of discontent or dissatisfaction they may appear, at first glance, to have little do with the mobilization of assistance from others. This is perhaps because much of the work to date has been on complaints about others who are not present at the time the complaint is being voiced, or what are sometimes called ‘indirect’ complaints (Boxer 1993).

Indirect complaints about others are designed to occasion empathy or affiliation in everyday talk (Drew and Walker 2009), although in institutional settings service providers often display reluctance to affiliate with complaints (Kevoe-Feldman 2018). However, as Migdadi et al. (2012) demonstrate in their analysis of indirect complaints by Jordanian speakers of Arabic about government departments to a radio talkback show, this is not always the case. In their study, a range of responses were occasioned by such complaints, including showing empathy, addressing the authorities concerned on air, and promising to help. While such promises may only be ostensible, it is nevertheless evident that indirect complaints can mobilize offers of assistance.

This possibility is even more pronounced in the case of ‘direct’ complaints where the expression of discontent is directed at a co-participant who is being held accountable for some kind of transgression or troubles (Emerson 2015). As Schegloff (2005) observes, direct complaints can occasion a wide range of different types of responses, ranging from admissions, apologies, or promises of redress to denials or counter-complaints. However, CA studies have demonstrated that in institutional encounters, such as customer service interactions or academic advising sessions, as participants are pre-aligned as service seeker-service provider (Raymond and Zimmerman 2016), complaints may also occasion offers of advice or assistance (Björkman 2015; Alshammari and Haugh 2024; Skogmyr Marian et al. 2023). Notably, complaints in those cases make relevant the negotiation of assistance (Márquez Reiter 2005; Ekström, Lindström and Karlsson 2013; Alshammari and Haugh 2025), thereby enabling the speaker to avoid making an outright request that presumes the recipient is necessarily responsible for providing assistance themselves.

There is also a growing body of studies of indirect complaints that are designed to elicit empathy or affiliation in L2 settings (Trosborg 1995; Yuan and Zhang 2018), although very few studies pay attention to the sequential development of those complaints. One important exception is Skogmyr Marian’s (2021) recent study of indirect complaints by L2 speakers of French in which she demonstrates that while both elementary and more advanced L2 speakers of French initiate these complaint sequences with positively valenced prefaces, the latter also deploy pre-complaint sequences that provide accounts for and thereby legitimize the projected complaint. However, there has been very little work, if any, on how complaints can be used by L2 speakers to mobilize assistance. The aim of this study is to address that gap.

The present study

In this study, we examine the way in which complaints are used to mobilize assistance in naturally occurring intercultural encounters between Saudi and Australian speakers of English across different contexts. Our research questions include:

• (1) how do troubles-complaints mobilize assistance?

• (2) what is accomplished through mobilizing assistance in this way?

• (3) what occasions (mis)alignment with troubles-complaints in L2 settings?

Data

The study is based on 40 recordings of naturally occurring encounters in which Saudi international students participated during their studies in Australia as part of a larger research project on the challenges faced by Saudi international students in interacting with local Australians when studying overseas (Alshammari 2020). These 40 recordings were collected by 18 Saudi postgraduate students who volunteered to participate in the research following an invitation by the first author to members of Saudi student associations at universities across three major cities in Australia. As the 18 Saudi participants were all enrolled in postgraduate programs and had met relevant entry requirements for English language (among other things), they were all relatively advanced speakers of English as an additional language.¹

As joining the project involved making recordings of intercultural encounters in which they themselves participated, the Saudi volunteers, who were acting as co-participant-recruiters, were asked to take part in individual training sessions about the national Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research organized by the first author. These sessions included instruction on both ethical and practical considerations when collecting recordings, including the need to gain informed consent from their co-participants prior to making any recordings, and the importance of discarding recordings if they were subsequently asked to do so by their co-participants. The first author remained in contact with the participants throughout the data collection process to maintain the overall quality and consistency of the recordings. In order to ensure the recordings were collected ‘in the wild’ (Eskildsen et al. 2019), the participants were coached to only make recordings of encounters they had initiated because they had real world reasons for doing so using recording devices they owned themselves, primarily their mobile phones. Although it was not specified what kinds of interactions should be recorded, an overall corpus of 40 recordings of primarily institutional L2 encounters was collected over a period of ten months from October 2016 to August 2017.²

Among these 40 encounters, the L2 Saudi participants accomplished a range of different actions, including requesting information, seeking advice, and making complaints. Following careful examination of these recordings, we identified twenty encounters in which assistance to resolve troubles was being sought through making complaints about those troubles, or what we term troubles-complaints. Troubles-complaints are broadly defined for our purposes as instances where the speakers ‘express suffering or discontentedness as a result of experiencing some trouble’ (Pillet-Shore 2015: 186) through negative observations, criticisms, extreme case formulations or raising complainable matters (Schegloff 2005; Pillet-Shore 2015) in order to mobilize assistance from the recipient. The troubles reported through these complaints ranged from problems with faulty products, excessive noise, dirty or untidy rentals through to difficulties with lease renewals, securing refunds or dealing with fines. The non-Saudi co-participants included retail assistants, administration officers, academic supervisors, rental property managers, travel agents, and customer service agents (for a summary of the dataset see Supplementary Appendix S1). While six of the encounters occurred on the phone and fourteen were co-present interactions, all of them were audio-recorded as the co-participants preferred not to be filmed. All of the analytic observations reported in this article take this limitation into account, and only claims that can be grounded in the available data are made.

Method

The sequential organization of the twenty encounters involving troubles-complaints were analysed using methods from ethnomethodological CA (Sacks et al. 1974; Heritage 1984). CA examines the practices or methods by which social actions are interactionally accomplished by participants, identifying recurrent features of the design of those actions and how they are responded to in turn. It involves paying close analytical attention to both the composition and position of the talk, as well as aspects of the situated context made relevant by participants in licensing inferences by the analyst about the understandings of participants. The recordings of the twenty encounters in which they arose were thus transcribed in full using standard CA transcription conventions (Jefferson 2004) in order to highlight specific features of the turn and sequential design of troubles-complaints (for a list of the CA transcription conventions used in this study see Supplementary Appendix S2). The analysis involved paying close attention to the composition and sequential development of the troubles-complaints, responses to them, and their overall structural organization.

An important data-internal warrant for claiming these sequences was understood by the participants as complaints designed to mobilize assistance was grounded in close examination of how participants responded to those putative complaints—what is known in CA as the next-turn proof procedure (Sacks et al. 1974). It emerged that these complaints occasioned either: (1) offers of assistance to resolve the troubles themselves or recruiting someone else to so (n = 15) (see excerpts 1–3); or (2) an (extended) account as to why assistance could not be offered (n = 5) (see excerpts 4–5). An additional data-internal warrant for our analytical claims emerged from the way in which the Saudi participants launching the troubles-complaint sequence only moved to close the encounter when they had accepted either the offer of assistance or their co-participant’s account for not making such an offer. Instances in which their co-participants moved to close the encounter prior to making an offer of assistance, or after providing an account for not doing so, were resisted by the Saudi participants through subsequent attempts to pursue a remedy to their complaints.

Analysis

We report and discuss the findings of our analysis in two parts. In the first part, we demonstrate how complaints can mobilize assistance in institutional encounters, and discuss what is accomplished through mobilizing assistance in this way (as opposed to requesting assistance). We argue that troubles-complaints afford the negotiation of the material and moral contingencies associated with offers of assistance, including what constitutes an appropriate form of assistance and who is responsible for providing that assistance. In the second part, we go on to discuss what occasions misalignment when L2 speakers attempt to mobilize assistance through complaints. We also consider evidence that the mobilization of assistance through complaints is preferred over requests for assistance in such cases.

Mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints

The first key finding from our study is that troubles-complaints are indeed successfully used by L2 speakers to mobilize assistance. By this, we mean that the troubles-complaint in question is not followed by some form of (dis)agreement or an attempt to divert the speaker away from that complaint through giving advice, but instead is followed by the recipient either initiating a sequence to offer some form of assistance to resolve the troubles in question, or providing an account as to why they are not able to provide assistance. A notable feature of the mobilization of assistance through troubles-complaints in L2 settings is that it allows for the negotiation of what kind of remedy can be provided and who is responsible for providing that remedy.

The way in which offers of assistance are made contingently relevant by troubles-complaints in institutional encounters is apparent in Excerpt (1). In this example, a tenant (TE) has called the property manager (PM) to complain about the amount of electricity the air conditioner in his apartment is currently using. Prior to this excerpt, the tenant has described how he has checked the electricity meter multiple times to monitor how much electricity is being consumed by the air conditioning unit.

The troubles-complaint in question is delivered through reference to a negative state of affairs (Schegloff 1988), namely, the amount of electricity the air conditioning unit is consuming (lines 1–2), delivered using an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz 1986) (line 1). This complaint not only establishes the relevance of providing some kind of remedy but implicitly positions the property manager as responsible for providing some form of assistance (either themselves or recruiting someone else to do so). In this case, the complaint occasions an offer from the property manager to call Ron, who is the property caretaker, to look into the problem (line 4), an offer which is accepted by the tenant (line 8). Assistance is mobilized in this case through implementing the canonical three-move trajectory of complaint sequences (Schegloff 2005: 465) as illustrated in Fig. 1:

In contrast to requests for assistance, however, what constitutes that assistance and who will provide it is left unspecified in the case of troubles-complaints.³ In short, in mobilizing assistance through a complaint, the tenant avoids a request for assistance, thereby affording negotiation of a proposed remedy and who will be responsible for providing it.

In some instances, assistance is mobilized through complaints that are elaborated through proposals of potential remedies. In excerpt (2), for instance, a customer (CS) complains to a sales assistant (SA) that a mattress he recently bought from their store is in poor condition (lines 1–3).

The troubles-complaint itself is delivered using an agentless factual declarative format (Rossi 2018) which frames the ‘not good’ condition of the mattress as being a state that was observed by the customer, rather than having been due to particular actions on the part of the parties concerned (Pomerantz 1978). In this way, the complaint is delivered in a way that forestalls any imputations of culpability (Turowetz and Maynard 2010) on the part of the store that the sales assistant represents. The customer then proposes a possible remedy to this complaint (lines 5–6). However, this proposal is hedged through a turn-final ‘or’ (Drake 2015), which orients to the possibility that other potential remedies to this complaint may be proposed by the sales assistant. Following a pre-offer sequence (Schegloff 2007), in which the sales assistant checks the store is indeed the responsible agent here (lines 8–11), the sales assistant goes on to offer assistance by outlining the steps the customer needs to take in order to secure a refund (lines 13–18), an offer which is subsequently accepted by the customer (line 19). In this case, then, the assistance mobilized by the complaint is an offer of a refund, rather than returning the mattress to get it repaired, with the store offering to take responsibility for securing that refund from the manufacturer once appropriate evidence is provided of the problem in question.

In some cases, a troubles-complaint can occasion a more extended troubles-diagnosis sequence in which the co-participants work towards a joint understanding of the troubles underpinning the complaint in question, usually through a series of interrogatives. Prior to excerpt (3), a sales assistant has offered to get the store manager to talk to a customer who has complained that a television he bought from their store last week is faulty. Following a brief greeting, the manager (MN) launches a ‘so’-prefaced formulation of the troubles in question that treats it as an incipient matter (Bolden 2009); that is, as emerging from the customer’s (CS) prior conversation with the sales assistant.⁴

The troubles in question are left relatively unspecified, however, in this indirect report of the customer’s complaint about the television as simply having ‘had something wrong’ (lines 1–2). The customer then reiterates his complaint that the television is faulty using an agentless factual declarative format (Rossi 2018), which once again forestalls any imputations of culpability (on the part of the customer) (lines 4–7). The manager subsequently launches an interrogative sequence in which he asks the customer to specify the problem with the television in order to confirm liability for the fault before making an offer of assistance (lines 8–9). In the course of this troubles-diagnosis sequence, the manager confirms that the issue is not due to the customer incorrectly operating the television (lines 10–18, data not shown). Following this, he confirms the store can take responsibility for providing a remedy (lines 19–21), and then offers to get the television repaired (lines 21–22). Notably, the offer of assistance itself is also formatted using a turn-final ‘or’, which allows for the possibility that the customer may propose another possibility remedy, an affordance that the customer indeed takes up in rejecting the proposed offer to get the television repaired (line 24), and proposing an alternative one, namely, a refund (line 25). The latter request for assistance specifies both the required assistance (i.e. a refund) and the responsible party (i.e. the store), but it, notably, only arises after the customer has rejected the offer of assistance mobilized by his initial troubles-complaint.

Overall, then, we can observe across these three excerpts how troubles-complaints occasion offers of assistance in L2 institutional encounters. In the first example, the complaint occasions an offer from the property manager to get the property caretaker to look into the problem with his air conditioning unit. In the second, the customer’s complaint occasions an offer of a refund from the sales assistant. In the third case, the complaint occasions an offer to get the faulty television repaired, although this offer is rejected in favour of a refund. These three cases exemplify a broader pattern in which the mobilization of assistance through troubles-complaints constitutes an alternative method of seeking assistance that enables those seeking to resolve troubles to avoid, or at least delay, outright requests for assistance.

One issue this raises is what is accomplished by mobilizing assistance through complaints instead of making requests? We would suggest that mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints indexes that the assistance in question involves a claim to a high degree of entitlement to receive assistance but acknowledges that providing that assistance involves a potentially high degree of contingency (Curl and Drew 2008). On the one hand, the person making the complaint is implementing a stance that they are entitled to receive assistance (Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2014). This is evident from the way in which offering assistance is made contingently relevant through troubles-complaints, and how, as we shall see, accounts for not offering assistance are occasioned when such offers are not forthcoming. It is also evident from the way in which the speakers in question pursue assistance when an offer of assistance of not made. On the other hand, through mobilizing assistance in this way the person making the complaint is also implementing a stance that the provision of assistance is highly contingent. These contingencies encompass both how the troubles in question can be remedied and who is responsible for implementing that assistance. Mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints is thus a method by which participants claim they are entitled to receive assistance, but are open to negotiation about who will provide assistance and how it will be provided.

Interactional (mis)alignment in the mobilization of assistance through troubles-complaints

A second key finding from our study is that troubles-complaints are preferred over requests for assistance in cases where the assistance to be provided requires negotiation. We have already noted that mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints is a method by which participants avoid making requests. In a small number of cases (n = 4), however, participants go on to produce requests for assistance rather than waiting for the recipient to offer assistance. In this section, we propose that requests for assistance, when they immediately follow complaints designed to mobilize complaints, constitute evidence of interactional misalignment in the turn and sequential design of those troubles-complaints. We suggest that this provides evidence that in cases where what kind of assistance and who is responsible for providing is oriented by co-participants as requiring negotiation, the mobilization of assistance through troubles-complaints is treated as preferred over requests for assistance.

Interactional alignment encompasses the ways in which turns (and sequences of turns) are designed to occasion responses that support the progressivity of sequentially prior actions, accept their presuppositions and terms, and match their formal design preference, as well as accept the interactional roles proposed in those actions (Steensig 2013). In the case of mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints, proffering assistance constitutes an aligning response, while providing an account is a disaligning one. The sequential organization of actions that lead to and follow troubles-complaints is summarized in Fig. 2.

However, in some instances, interactional misalignment is engendered through ‘ill-formed’ turn or sequential design (Drew 2018: 73). By well-formedness we mean the extent to which the design of a particular action is oriented by those participants as pragmatically fitted to that sequential context. In the following two cases, we observe that producing requests for assistance following complaints designed to mobilize assistance constitutes evidence of interactional misalignment.

In excerpt (4), a postgraduate student (PS) is complaining that he has not received feedback from his academic supervisor (SR) on a research paper the student had previously asked his supervisor to comment on. In this case, mobilization of assistance through a troubles-complaint is pursued through a subsequent request for assistance. However, this request for assistance is only implemented following the noticeable absence of an offer of assistance following that complaint.

The complaint is delivered through a negative observation by the student that he is still waiting for feedback on the co-authored paper (lines 1–4). Following a noticeable gap, however, the supervisor responds with ‘right’ (lines 5–6), indicating an orientation to this as a previously discussed matter, before going to offer an account as to why he has not yet provided feedback (lines 11–13). Notably, unlike the other examples we have discussed, this is not a justificatory account as to why assistance cannot be provided, but rather a defensive account as to why assistance has not yet been provided. This means that a complaint is being treated as implicitly conveying an accusation of wrongdoing (Pomerantz 1978) that is responded to here with an implicit denial of wrongdoing. The student then pursues the troubles-complaint through a request for assistance (lines 14–15), which the supervisor grants (lines 16–17). However, the latter does so using a confirmation format (‘of course’) that implicitly pushes back against the presupposition that this request needs to be granted in the first place (Stivers 2011).

While at first glance it might seem as if this supervisor is being negligent, his account suggests that providing feedback on a paper that was co-authored with another academic outside of the supervisory team goes beyond his institutional responsibilities. It is worth noting that embedded within the supervisor’s account that he has been ‘very busy’ is also a possible complaint that being asked to provide such feedback represents an unwanted imposition on his time. In this way, then, the supervisor is pushing back against the student’s claim to have a high entitlement to receive assistance with his paper. One upshot of this is that the way in which the student attempts to mobilize assistance through his initial troubles-complaint is pragmatically ill-formed. Mobilizing assistance through complaints is a method by which participants index they are mobilizing high entitlement, high contingency assistance. In this case, however, the student does not—from the supervisor’s perspective at least—have a high entitlement to receive assistance in this case. Mobilizing assistance through a troubles-complaint and then pursuing that complaint through a request for assistance is thus pragmatically ill-fitted to their respective roles in this interactional context. Both actions are not only resisted by the supervisor but are treated as inapposite, and interactional misalignment ensues. The request for assistance is occasioned due to this interactional misalignment, as well as further contributing to it.

In the second case of interactional misalignment, we examine here, a tenant has called the property manager to complain about the state of the carpet in his apartment and how long it has been taking to get replaced.

The complaint is delivered over an extended series of turns. However, rather than beginning with a stepwise introduction of the complaint in question (Drew and Walker 2009), the tenant starts by explicitly announcing the purpose of the call is to make a complaint (lines 1–2). The troubles-complaint itself is then delivered through a series of negative observations that lead to an accusation that despite calling some time back, he has not received a response from the property manager about getting the carpet changed (lines 7–16). This is immediately followed by a request for assistance from the property manager (lines 17–18).

The property manager, however, does not respond by granting or declining the latter request, but rather first thanks the tenant for his call (line 20), and then responds with an account that denies responsibility for changing the carpet lies with the rental agency (lines 21–24), which then leads into an extended explanation of the respective rights of landlords and tenants (data not shown). The property manager’s response thus constitutes an indirect response that treats that request as inapposite (Walker et al. 2011). In countering that responsibility lies with the landlord rather than the rental agency, she offers an account as to why she has not been back in contact with the tenant. In other words, she avoids either granting or declining the request, but rather offers a reason for not doing so, thereby implicitly treating the tenant’s request as unwarranted.

The interactional misalignment that arises here is arguably due to the request for assistance following the tenant’s complaint being pragmatically ill-fitted to this sequential context. Complaints that mobilize assistance are sequentially fitted to instances where it is being treated by participants as high entitlement, high contingency assistance. However, the subsequent request for assistance treats this assistance as a relatively low contingency by locating primary responsibility for remedying the troubles with the property manager. This not only creates sequential incoherence with the just prior troubles-complaint (which presumes providing assistance is a high contingency matter), but is also pragmatically ill-fitted to that interactional context, as changing carpets in a rental property is the responsibility of the property owner, while the responsibility of the rental agency is only to facilitate negotiations between tenants and property owners (and to ensure both parties met their legal obligations). This interactional misalignment then occasions a conflict sequence in which the tenant goes on to make a series of accusations and threats, although this is to no avail as the tenant is once again advised that he will just have to wait for a response from the property owner (data not shown).

In this case, there are issues both with the turn and sequential design of the tenant’s complaint that occasion interactional misalignment and conflict. The complaint itself is announced explicitly as a complaint and then delivered as a series of negative observations that accuse the property manager of not taking appropriate action (ill-formed turn design). It is then followed by a request for assistance that positions the property manager as responsible for resolving those troubles (ill-formed sequential design). Once again, what gives rise to interactional misalignment here is not the grammatical form of either the complaint or request, but rather its turn and sequential design, including concluding the troubles-complaint sequence with an explicit request for assistance. Rather than occasioning an offer of assistance, this engenders interactional misalignment.

Overall, it is evident that the mobilization of assistance through complaints is treated as preferred over requests for assistance when what kind of assistance and who will provide it needs to be negotiated. In such cases, requests for assistance are treated as only properly made later in an encounter after an offer of assistance has already been made (excerpt 3). Thus, when requests for assistance occur prior to an offer of assistance being made this occasions interactional misalignment (excerpts 4 and 5). The way in which requests for assistance are both occasioned by interactional misalignment, as well as engendering it, is a consequence of the way in which requests for assistance following a troubles-complaint that is designed to mobilize assistance is sequentially incoherent. This incoherence arises because a request for assistance undermines the claim immanent to the troubles-complaint that it involves high contingency assistance, as a request for assistance orients to the assistance as involving lower contingencies. It is, in short, pragmatically ill-formed as a method in that interactional context. Our claim here is that using methods to mobilize assistance that are pragmatically ill-fitted to a particular sequential context constitutes evidence of interactional misalignment in that sequence, which can, in some instances, occasion interactional troubles or even conflict. This provides further evidence of the fact that getting assistance from others to deal with troubles one cannot resolve on one’s own involves much more than simply the capacity to make requests.

Conclusion

Some troubles require assistance from others to be resolved. While in many cases we may request assistance from our co-participant(s), another method by which we can mobilize assistance is through complaints. In this article, we have examined how troubles-complaints are used by Saudi L2 speakers of English as a method by which to mobilize assistance. Our claim is that mobilizing assistance through troubles-complaints is a recognizable practice by which requests can be avoided, not only for those L2 Saudi speakers but for their Australian co-participants as well, who occupy various institutional roles and come from various different backgrounds. We note that while on a standard pragmatic account avoiding requests might appear to be a means of reducing the imposition on the recipient (Brown and Levinson 1987), troubles-complaints carry the presumption that the speaker has a relatively high entitlement to have the troubles raised through that complaint remedied. Mobilizing assistance in this way is thus done in recognition of the significant contingencies that may be involved in proffering assistance in some instances. These contingencies include not only working out what might constitute an appropriate form of assistance but who is ultimately responsible, if anyone, for providing that assistance.

It is now widely acknowledged that there is more to pragmatic competence than being able to use grammatically correct and situationally appropriate forms for accomplishing different actions in social interaction (Félix-Brasdefer 2019). Much of this important work has focused on the sequential groundwork necessary for L2 speakers to make requests. As Al-Gahtani and Roever (2012) and others have argued, our focus should thus be on L2 speakers explicitly learning and teaching these sequential routines, not just the grammatical formats for making requests. However, an ethnomethodological CA perspective brings more to the table than advocating that greater attention be paid to the sequential development of requests. From an ethnomethodological perspective, participants manage social interaction through a range of different methods that enable them to interactionally accomplish particular actions in mutually understandable and accountable ways (Pekarek Doehler and Berger 2018). Mobilizing assistance is not exhausted, as we have seen, through making requests. We can also mobilize assistance by making complaints. This is not to say that requests are not used to mobilize assistance. Our point is that there are various methods by which L2 speakers can mobilize assistance and all of them are important to be considered when developing pragmatic competence in the target language in question.

The learning and teaching of pragmatic competence thus needs to go beyond traditional sets of speech acts. As these Saudi L2 speakers of English have demonstrated, navigating the troubles of everyday life requires more than knowing how to make requests. This is all the more important as while the use of grammatically ill-formed formats can arguably be interactionally managed using standard methods for accomplishing (and sometimes contesting) intersubjectivity, including repair or formulations, pragmatically ill-formed actions are more subtle and difficult to detect and resolve through these standard methods for monitoring intersubjectivity.

Finally, it is important to note that we have privileged in our analysis how L2 speakers of English mobilize assistance through complaints rather than those of L1 speakers. Our view here is that the ways in which highly proficient L2 speakers navigate social interaction is also a legitimate and effective target for the teaching and learning of pragmatic competence, in addition to so-called ‘native speaker’ or L1 norms (whatever they might be). Rather than using assuming, we necessarily need to use L1 interactions as the bar, we have treated the ways in which relatively proficient L2 speakers of English mobilize assistance in the course of navigating institutional encounters as our target of analysis. There remain, of course, interesting questions about the relative preponderance of different methods for mobilizing assistance across different populations of speakers, the potential impact of nonverbal dimensions of interaction on the overall trajectory of such encounters, the role of factors such as gender, age and first language, and whether such methods vary across other sociocultural contexts. However, although we acknowledge that further research with larger samples is needed to tease out potential sociocultural variation in the use of complaints to mobilize assistance, we also argue that it is important to bear in mind that participants are invariably focused on getting things done in the world and on successfully enacting methods by which that can be done. In this article, we have demonstrated that assistance can be mobilized by L2 speakers not only through requests but also through complaints. It is the various ways of accomplishing real world actions, such as seeking assistance from others, that are ultimately the target for the development of pragmatic competence in different languages.

Supplementary data

Supplementary data is available at Applied Linguistics online.

REFERENCES

Notes on Contributors

Bandar Alshammari is an Assistant Professor of Interactional Linguistics in the School of Arts at the University of Ha’il. His postdoctoral research focuses on the structural analysis of troubles-remedy sequences, (im)politeness, offence, and the moral order of interaction through the lens of interactional pragmatics and ethnomethodological conversation analysis.

Michael Haugh is Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the role of language in social interaction drawing from research in conversation analysis and pragmatics. He has published more than 150 articles and books, including The Sociopragmatics of Emotion (2025, Cambridge University Press, ed. with L. Alba-Juez), Morality in Discourse (2025, Oxford University Press, ed. with R. Márquez Reiter), the Sociopragmatics of Japanese (2023, Routledge, with Y. Obana), and Action Ascription in Interaction (2022, Cambridge University Press, ed. with A. Deppermann).

Footnotes