Social Complaints: A Frame-based Perspective On Multimodal Storytelling

Research on everyday complaints has its practical value in such fields as health psychology,marketing,interpersonal conflict management,and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.As Boxer(2010)has pointed out,any language learner needs to know that complaint interaction can be a way to create rapport.In this dissertation,I argue for the idea of complaints as pragmatic acts on social media,whereby the complainable can be experienced past events or projected future fantasies.The recipients of complaints can be a targeted or an imagined audience,who may or may not be the source of the complaints concerned.The complaints are often multimodally represented in text-image combination.This conceptualization verges on the studies of indirect complaints or third-party complaints in face-to-face communication,which are deemed an essential means of creating intimacy,negotiating individual and relational identities,and constructing the community of practice.Yet studies at home on complaints as such are rare.Mostly the focus is biased toward direct complaints whose data are elicited mainly from discourse completion tests.Research situated in social media is mainly on direct complaints from customers.The aspect of multimodality is seldom touched on by the time when the dissertation was being composed.Therefore,the value of my work lies in addressing the research gap of indirect complaints in Chinese sociocultural context whereby the naturally occurring complaints are often multimodally represented on social media.I also triangulate my theoretical construct through metapragmatic data from surveys and interviews.Specifically,my focus is on social complaints(SCs)in the semi-public communicative environment of We Chat Moments and to find out:(1)How are SCs multimodally constructed and construed in the environment of Moments?(2)What kind of interpersonal meaning can be achieved in and through SCs in Moments?(3)How are SCs intuitively conceptualized and evaluated by native speakers in the Chinese sociocultural context?After a straightforward introduction of the research focus in Chapter 1,I present my research design step-by-step through a detailed literature review on complaints(Chapter2),a development of the analytical framework(Chapters 3 and 4),an elaboration of the research data and methodology(Chapter 5),a comprehensive analysis of the naturally-occurring multimodal data(Chapters 6,7,and 8)and elicited meta-pragmatic data(Chapter 9),before bridging all the findings together for an argument of the master frame guiding Moments users’ communicative behaviors.In the conclusion I point out the communicative potential and interpersonal significance of the pragmatic acts under study(Chapter 10).As different conceptualizations breed different terminologies,a systematic review of previous studies covering definition,classification,methodology,etc.demonstrates that a more applicable term for complaint behaviors in social media context shall better be function-oriented and the research shall be designed to capture the act in its full complexity and dynamics.By arguing social complaints as pragmatic acts,I intend to adopt a cross-disciplinary perspective to develop my analytic framework,which covers storytelling,footing and positioning,participation framework,multimodality,and frame analysis.My research design is question-oriented,taking ethical issues into consideration.I follow virtual ethnography for data collection,and computer-mediated discourse analysis for data analysis,triangulating my reading with personal interviews,focus group interviews and online surveys.The whole design targets three levels of analysis.At the problem level,through the frame analysis,I attempt to crystalize the SC patterns in Moments.At the technical level,I focus on the various positioning strategies social media users adopt to do impression and rapport management.Finally,at the philosophical level,I attempt to identify in a broader sense what lurks behind the Moments users’ complaining behaviors,which can be metaphorically viewed as the master frame of social contract.The social contract as proposed in this paper is both cognitive and social,constituting users’ orientation towards social altruism and the negotiation of social identities.Social altruism is manifested in the expectations of reciprocity,affiliation,and hedonism.Social identities are less about one’s authenticity than about a socially sanctioned self-display in the Friends community.The social contract depicted as such embodies Chinese philosophical spirit of li and ren,based on which people develop an ego-centric relational collectivity in accordance with the long-standing harmonious family culture.The ultimate purpose of social complaints among Moments users is to gain social rewards,both tangible and intangible.By multimodally reframing the negative emotions,Moments users are doing their moral work intrapersonally and interpersonally.The dissertation is expected to enrich pragmatic studies on complaints in the Chinese sociocultural context both theoretically and empirically.