‘I played it like this’: voice quality and complaint management in Italian conversation

Formulation and reception of complaints is planned around the pursuit and offer of affiliative responses, prompting complainants and recipients to employ different strategies to achieve their goals. In this article, I identify voxing as an interactional resource that allows participants to manage their stance towards both the targets and the producers of a complaint. Through the analysis of an extended naturally occurring spontaneous interaction in Italian, I demonstrate how the modification of one’s voice quality allows speakers to re-brand their complaints, manage their situational identity, and signal acknowledgment of their interlocutors’ plans. These findings suggest that voxing, rather than being a correlate of direct reported speech, is a distinct full-fledged conversational device with both procedural and identity performative functions, which could be found in other languages and interactional contexts as well.