ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an exploratory investigation of how the development of complaint practices relates to larger socialization processes, particularly as it concerns the accumulation of shared knowledge over time and evolving social relationships. It presents two longitudinal case studies that track the recurrence of two different complainables (complaint objects) in two focal participants’ interactions with their coparticipants. The analyses show that the way in which speakers accomplish complaints is inextricably tied to the nature of the relationship between the participants and to what the participants know about each other from prior encounters. As the relationship and the participants’ shared interactional histories develop, so do the participants’ complaint practices. Examples of changes include differences in how complaints are initiated and in the coparticipants’ affiliative contributions to complaint sequences.
