Complaints And Their Responses In Chinese Conversations

As a common speech act, complaint has gained much attention of scholars at home and abroad. But most of the studies are contrastive analysis based on data collected from daily life via Discourse Completion Test (DCT). In this paper, based on conversation analysis (CA) of the complaints taken from institutional interactions, we intend to conduct a comprehensive study of their sequence structures by employing speech act theory, politeness principle, face theory and institutional power.The novelty of this study is shown in the following two aspects. First, this paper takes the interactions between individuals and an institution as the data, thus avoiding the disadvantages of using DCT and reflecting truly the structure features of complaint speech act occurring in institutional interactions. Second, adopting a new perspective, this paper studies the sequence structures based on CA of the complaints.We find that there are two categories of complaints according to the target (the service of some Phone Operators (PO) and phone card businesses respectively). The first category contains four phases:initiation, core part, development and closing, during which complaints are carried out in a direct way. The second category contains three stages: initiation, core part and closing, during which complaints are embedded in questions and thus ignored by POs and called "potential complaints". Two basic patterns are raised based on their respective features.It is also found that complaints here hardly threaten POs’face due to the fact that the recipient is not the complainee himself and the service call is set to deal with customers’ complaints. Therefore, callers adopt neither positive politeness strategies nor negative politeness strategies when carrying out complaints. In the first category, callers perform complaints baldly as a result of their certainty of the complainability; while in the second category, the complaints are embedded in interrogatives due to the uncertainty of complainability.Besides, the author also investigates the turn numbers of both parties and the employment of interruption device. We found that the indexes are basically same except that if callers take the initiative to interrupt, they will never withdraw. It shows that both parties communicate in a relatively equal atmosphere. Callers have status power (Customers are god) while POs have expertise power in phone card businesses, what’s more, their interactions are goal-oriented, thus these two kinds of power are roughly counteracted and there is no obvious power asymmetry.This study aims to widen the research perspective of complaints and enrich the study of speech acts. Besides, this study has many implications for both Mobile Communications companies and customers.