Linguistic Resources for Complaints in Conversation

Complaints might be thought a priori to be a good place to find paralinguistic features in a natural setting. Using conversation analytic methodology, I argue that the phonetic design of complaints is mostly determined by other sequential features of the turn in which the complaint is delivered. In particular, a turn delivering a complaint can either be marked as designed to receive an affiliative reponse (and thus a continuation of the activity of complaining), or marked as closing down the complaint sequence.