A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Complaints: Gender Perspective

This paper is concerned with a gender based intracultural investigation of complaint speech act realization patterns. The goals of the investigation are to find out the realization patterns of complaint speech act in Chinese, and to establish the similarities and differences between male and female's realization patterns in the complaint speech act in the social situation-social distance and relative power.This paper is based on the theories-Austin's and Searle's Speech Act Theory, Leech's Politeness Theory, Gu's Politeness Theory, Xu's Politeness Theoty and Brown and Levinson's Face Threatening Theory. Combining the theories and the actual results from the questionnaire, this paper concludes the complaining strategies used by Chinese male and female. Complaining is a face threatening speech act. Thus during the daily communication, the speaker of complaining have to follow certain politeness principles. Moreover, different gender of speaker and hearer can influence the choices of complaining strategies, to a certain extent. This paper introduces three models about the relation of language and gender. Though the combination of the dominance model presented by Otto Jesperson (1922) in his book Language; Its Nature, Development and the results from the questionnaire, conclusions are drawn that there are differences of complaining strategies used by Chinese male and female and the causes of the differences are obtained.The questions that this thesis will answer are as follows.(1) Are there any differences of complaint strategies between male and female? What are the common complaint strategies used by male and female?(2) Are there any gender differences of complaint strategies associated with social distance?(3) Are there any gender differences of complaint strategies associated with relative power? (4) Are there any differences of complaint strategies between homosexual and between heterosexual? What are the common complaint strategies between homosexual and between heterosexual?There are two types of questionnaire. The first one is in the form of DCT. The aim is to obtain the Chinese complaint strategies through the analysis of the data from the first questionnaire. The second type of questionnaire has the same questions with the first questionnaire, but it has multiple choice items, which are designed according to the Chinese complaint strategies obtained from the analysis of the first questionnaire. The methods of data analysis in this paper are percentage, frequency and descriptive analysis in SPSS 17.0.It is found that there are same complaint strategies used by Chinese male and female and there are also different complaint strategies. Generally, Chinese male is more direct than female. Chinese male prefers to use suggestion, while Chinese female likes to use positive politeness to express their complaints. In detail, female is more polite and indirect than male, when female and male complain to friends and to the people with relative lower power. Both male and female complain to the friends more directly than to the strangers; both male and female complain to the people with relative higher power more direct and polite than to the people with relative lower power; both male and female choose keep silent, when they want to complain to the strangers; both male and female choose negative politeness, i.e. avoidance-based complaint to the people with relative higher power. According to the analysis of complaint strategy related with homosexual and heterosexual complaint objects, homosexual complaints are more direct than heterosexual complaints. Generally, homosexual prefer to use suggestion to complain to object, while heterosexual like to use negative politeness. Both male and female choose suggestion to the homosexual complaint objects. Female is more polite and indirect than male to the heterosexual complaint objects.On the whole, female is more polite than male, or female is more easily to compromise than male. This is shown in the differences of complaint strategy between male's and female's complaints to friends, people with relative lower power, and heterosexual. The features displayed in the analysis reflect that female has lower social status than male.This paper connects the western linguistic theories with the situation in China. The analysis of the investigation tests and verifies whether the situation in China fits for the western linguistic theories. And this paper sheds lights on applying western pragmatics to the situation in China. Moreover, this paper studies the complaining speech act from the perspective of Chinese gender. And it enriches the study of complaining speech act. Therefore, this paper is supposed to inspire the interests of Chinese linguists to construct a systematic and mature Chinese pragmatic theory.However, there are limitations in this thesis. The questionnaire is the written form. So the setting is not as authentic as the real setting and the written form is more formal than the oral conversation; in the eight settings of the questionnaire, there is no study of the settings with cross social variables; and the scope of the subjects are limited, which can influence the results of the investigation. Therefore, further studies can focus on these limitations and make improvements.