A Contrastive Analysis Of The Speech Act Of Complaints In Chinese And English

In cross-cultural communication and foreign language learning, differences in language use have been noted to be a major factor for leading to communication breakdown or pragmatic failure. Thus it is not only necessary for foreign learners to realize the differences between language forms, and learn the rules of the use of the target language, but also necessary for them to understand the cultural values which the language reflects, so as to convey communicative intent in effective and appropriate ways. The prominence of communicative competence in the goals of the second language teaching highlights the need to study effective ways to minimize the misunderstanding, embarassment even offence in cross-cultural communication.The study of speech act has long been regarded as one of the central concerns of pragmatics, especially cross-cultural pragmatics. And it is also one of the basic tools for the study of communicative competence. Complaint is a face-threatening speech act which threatens the face of the hearer in the human communication activities. People from different cultural backgrounds are influenced by different social variables, and thus adopt different expression patterns. The study on how the interlocutors communicate their intents effectively and appropriately on special occasions under the Chinese-English culture has implications for both foreign language teaching and cross-cultural communication.In recent years, some scholars abroad have made contrastive studies on the speech act of complaint between English and other languages. However, little work has been done on the complaint in Chinese, still less of the contrastive study between Chinese and English. And the contrastive studies at home mostly focus on the study of realization patterns of complaint by Chinese and American university students in the framework of politeness theories. In the present thesis, qualitative analysis is used to find out the basic structure of the complaint sequence of and the strategies of the faced complaint, and to investigate the similarities and differences in the elements of the sequence in Chinese and English, and the strategies of complaints between Chinese and English. The method of synchronic contrastive analysis is mainly used to study the contemporary differences in the types of complaints and strategies of the direct complaint based on the descriptive study of the data collected from Chinese and English people of various occupations with reference to social variables such as social power and distance. Then the cultural analysis is conducted in order to explore the cultural values hidden behind the complaint differences such as the uses of Auxiliary Speech Act and Microunit, and the differences in the types of complaints and in the use of strategies. Meanwhile, the thesis analyzes the response patterns in Chinese and English.The thesis, as a whole, contains seven chapters and the introduction. The introduction presents the method of contrastive analysis and the purpose of the study. In Chapter one, complaint speech is defined and the classification of complaint speech is re-established on the basis of previous researches. And the responses are also presented in the study of complaint.Chapter two covers the origin of the speech act study and presents a general review on the findings of contrastive study of complaint speech drawn by the researchers both at home and abroad. Then the drawbacks of the previous studies are proposed.Chapter three discusses the research design of the present study. The instrument and the subjects from various occupations are presented, followed by the procedures of data collection and the analysing method. At last the validity of the data collection method used in this dissertation is analyzed.Chapter four depicts the detailed analysis of the collected data. By qualitative analysis, the author generalizes the semantic formula and strategies of complaint speech, and by statistical analysis, the author finds out that under the influence of social power and distance, there are similarities and differences in the types of complaints and the realization strategies between Chinese and English. Chapter five explores the correlation between complaint elements and cultural patterns, and the correlation between complaint strategies and cultural patterns, based on the analysis of the data.Chapter six analyses the second part of the complaint adjacent——the response patterns of complaint speech, according to the discourse analysis theory.The last chapter summarizes the thesis and presents the theoretical implications and the implications for cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching and learning. At last, the limitations and the suggestion for further research is proposed.