This study examines pragmatic variation across Turkish and American English in the speech act of chastisement, towards analyzing whether and where cases of pragmatic transfer occur in the interlanguage of advanced level EFL learners whose L1 is Turkish. Data was collected from 80 native speakers of Turkish, 14 native speakers of American English and 68 advanced Turkish EFL speakers via situated written role-plays where people responded to the wrongdoing of a status unequal interlocutor at the workplace. Data analysis involves revealing the type and frequency of semantic formulas used by the three groups on the same speech act. Native speaker data was then used as baseline for cross-cultural comparison and for detecting cases for positive and negative transfer, as defined by Kasper (1992). Findings show some similarities and significant differences across Americans and Turks in their choice of strategies for dealing with the same speech act in interacting with a status unequal person. While similarities were found to lead to positive pragmatic transfer in the target language performance of Turkish EFL learners, sociolinguistic relativity appeared to lead to negative transfer (hence, pragmatic interference) in others. Results also showed that EFL learners also developed an interlanguage of speech act strategies, at least so far as chastisement was concerned. Results in general indicate that those students categorized as ‘advanced’ level learners, usually following grammar-oriented proficiency and placement exams, can diverge greatly from target language norms, hence lacking in appropriacy, thus sociolinguistic competence in the target language. This is turn suggests that aspects of sociolinguistic competence are not acquired alongside the grammatical features of the target language in EFL situations, thus these might need to be another focus of instruction.