A Pragmatic Approach To Gender Differences Of Complaints In Friends

Since the early 1970s, prompted by the women's movement, studies on language and gender have been receiving more attentions form linguists. The early studies on gender differences mainly focused on phonology, morphology and syntax. With the development of speech act theory, scholars started to do empirical studies on speech acts. Compared with studies of compliment, apology, disagreement, request and invitation, studies on gender differences of speech acts of complaints have been found insufficient either at home or abroad. Complaint is a commonly-occurred speech act in everyday human interactions, and by its nature is a face-threatening act. Speaker employs certain kinds of complaint realization pattern and complaint strategy to express his/her complaint to hearer, and then the hearer will employ a certain kind of response to the complaint. Thus, the thesis sets out to examine gender differences in the selection of complaint realization patterns, complaint strategies and complaint-response strategies with the purpose to explain such differences.Based on Speech Act Theory, Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) and Brown and Levinson's Face Saving Theory (FST), the current thesis adopts the quantitative and qualitative research methods to make a pragmatic analysis of the gender differences of speech acts of complaints in Season Seven of Friends, a famous sitcom in America. It intends to demonstrate how females and males differ in employing complaint realization patterns, complaint strategies and complaint-response strategies. The purpose of the study aims to help people get a better understanding of gender differences between males and females in expressing complaints and giving responses to the complaints, thus to promote a harmonious social relationship between men and women. Friends mainly involves three male friends and three female friends, whose language is closely related to the colloquial language in daily life, and which contains a great number of complaints behaviors. A total of 359 speech acts of complaints collected from Season Seven comprise the data base of the present study. Through analysis, it is found that complaints from females occur more frequently than males and direct and indirect complaints produced by females are more than males as well. Later, some tentative studies on gender differences are conducted on three levels of complaint behaviors, namely, complaint realization patterns, complaint strategies and complaint-response strategies. The findings of the present study seem to indicate that gender differences do exist on the above three levels:(1) On the level of complaint realization patterns, males tend to use more imperative sentences, rhetorical questions and conditional clauses, while females tend to use more interrogative sentences, exclamatory sentences and repetitions.(2) On the level of complaint strategies, males are observed to use more explicit complaint strategies and accusation and warning strategies, while females are found to use the other two strategies more frequently, i.e. no explicit reproach (hints) strategies and expression of annoyance or disapproval strategies. Moreover, gender differences in employing complaint strategies are also affected by addressees'gender.(3) On the level of complaint-response strategies, males tend to employ more acceptance of the complaint strategies and disregarding of the complaint strategies, while females tend to use partial acceptance of the complaint strategies and rejection of the complaint strategies more frequently. Moreover, gender differences in employing complaint-response strategies are also affected by addressees'gender.Finally, the limitations of the present study are pointed out with some suggestions for further study provided as well.