When apology replaces justification: pragmatic transfer and interactional patterns in Korean learners’ Thai complaints

This study examines how complaint behaviour is shaped by pragmatic transfer in Korean learners of Thai, moving beyond a focus on strategy choice to consider the interactional organisation of speech acts. From an interlanguage pragmatic perspective, it investigates how complaints are constructed across contexts differing in social distance and power. Data were collected through Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCTs) involving three scenarios: confidentiality violation, ignored help request and false accusation. The findings reveal systematic differences between Korean learners and Thai native speakers, not only in levels of directness but also in the sequencing and interactional framing of complaint acts. Thai speakers tend to foreground epistemic entitlement through justification and requests for clarification, particularly in peer contexts. In contrast, Korean learners show a stronger preference for mitigation, apology-first sequencing and alignment strategies, especially in hierarchical interactions. These patterns suggest that learners interpret power relations through culturally grounded understandings of hierarchy and interpersonal relations, resulting in heightened sensitivity to hierarchical risk and, in some cases, communicative inhibition. The study contributes to interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) by demonstrating that pragmatic transfer operates at the level of interactional organisation. A two-layer model of pragmatic transfer is proposed, integrating sociopragmatic calibration and pragmalinguistic realisation, with implications for context-sensitive pragmatic instruction.