Indirect Complaints from a Diachronic Perspective

In my postdoc project (German: Habilitation), I investigate indirect complaints and indirect complaint responses in 17th to 19th century British English. Even though indirect complaints (in their stigmatized form also known as whining, griping, and moaning) constitute an inherent part of our present-day social life, previous research has focused heavily on direct complaints in general and conversation analytical perspectives on indirect complaints, much to the neglect of other approaches. My project aims at remedying this gap from the perspective of historical pragmatics.

Unlike direct complaints, indirect complaints refer to complaints which are made to someone who is not deemed responsible for the complainable (not to be confused with how 'implicit' or 'explicit' a complaint is). 

For my data, I draw mainly on the letter, journal and diary, and drama subcorpora of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER), which I analyzed during a 3-month research stay at the University of Helsinki in spring 2022 (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation). This is supplemented by data from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) and the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED). In addition, I investigate the meta-discursive construction of the speech act of (indirect) complaints. For this, I additionally draw on a database of historical etiquette and conduct handbooks.