A Contrastive Study On The Speech Act Of Complaints In Chinese And English

Since Austin and Searle raise speech act theories, linguists have done a great deal of research on the speech acts of requests, apologies, compliments, and refusals. The speech act of complaining is an important research subject of pragmatics. With the development of research into speech acts, some investigations on complaints has been done, but they received little attention on contrastive study of Chinese and English complaints. Therefore, it is necessary to make a further contrastive study on complaints between Chinese and English. Complaining is considered as one of the face-threatening act(FTA). Since'face'has especially important meaning in Chinese cultural norms and they are different from western face values, a cross-cultural investigation on the differences in pragmlinguistic and sociopragmatic features of the speech act of complaining between Chinese and English should be interesting and worth doing.This thesis investigates the similarities and differences of complaint strategies used in Chinese and English by conducting a cross-cultural study. We have a look at the use of complaining in two different groups: native English speakers (American adult students), native Chinese speakers (Chinese adult students in China). Using the Discourse Completion Test(DCT) modified from politeness theory by Scollon & Scollon (1995), we demonstrate that Chinese culture has different understanding of'face'and'politeness'from American culture, which are reflected in and impact on the use of complaint strategies in the two groups. Twenty Chinese speakers and sixteen native speakers of English participated in the study. Data for this study was collected via a written questionnaire in the form of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). Five situations for complaint are included in the questionnaire. According to the data we have collected, eleven complaint strategies are defined in the thesis and the use of the eleven complaint strategies by Chinese and American across five situations are respectively analyzed and discussed in details. The effects of contextual variables on complaint strategy selection are examined. The contextual variables include social power, social distance, contract and the level of speaker's expectations. Average frequencies of complaint strategies per item by each contextual variable according to the two groups are conducted to see how contextual variables are related to the choice of complaint strategies.The differences of complaint strategies in the two languages are caused by the underlying cultural differences of the two societies. The most general finding is that there are some similarities but more differences on the use of complaint strategies in Chinese and English. Different social variables, e.g. power, distance and weight of imposition, will affect the realization of the speech act of complaining to a great extent in both cultures. Therefore, understanding the differences of complaint strategies between Chinese and Americans and the underlying cultural differences will be helpful in employing complaint strategies appropriately, developing English learners'ability to perform speech acts and achieving a successful cross-culture communication.