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This article intends to illuminate the important role that emotions display plays in performing a communicative activity as common as it is the expression of complaints. Drawing on the analysis of excerpts from "natural" conversations among friends and relatives, the present article focuses on showing the ways in which emotive meanings are articulated in complaint discourse, through the cooperative work of both prosodic and verbal devices. In this analysis it is also stressed the strong links that some of these devices have with gender norms, that is, their capacity to communicate sociocultural meanings such as "feminity" and "masculinity", and how these norms seem to be fulfilled to a high extent in the data, as "feminine" emotive forms are located in talk among women, while those which present a most stereotypical "masculine" character are only found in talk among men.
