A Study On The Speech Act Of Chinese Complaining

As a common phenomenon in daily life, the speech act of complaint get fewer studies especially in pragmatic way than apology, thanking, compliment, refusals, criticism, etc. In this thesis, we intend to make a comprehensive analysis of it by using the speech act theory and the study of pragmatic strategies. The point to be discussed can be brought under three main aspects:Firstly, the redefinition of complaining bases itself on the former studies, and reveals three elements of it. With the new definition, we can distinguish the speech act of complaining from the complaining words and other related speech acts.Secondly, descriptive analysis of the complaints'conversational structure is carried out in terms of the discourse structure, the conversational proceeding and the responsive model. For one thing, five patterns are summarized from the standpoint of sequence of complaining language. Subsequently, an analysis of the conversational proceeding of complaining is given based on the turn-taking and conversational process. Afterwards, the responsive model receives a detailed summary on the basis of direct complaining and indirect complaining.Thirdly, we perform analysis of complaining strategies from two points of view. The first goes to the functional syntactical structure of the central speech act. The research result indicates that declarative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences are all adopted in large quantities for implementing complaint, while imperative sentences are in the minority. Then, we describe the strategies of complaining by probing deeply into the three parts of complaining, namely reference, central speech act and auxiliary speech act.