A Pragmatic Analysis Of Gender Differences In Complaints In The Big Bang Theory

The study of linguistic gender differences becomes the hot topic in sociolinguistics.Many linguists focus on static study on linguistic gender differences from such aspects aslexical, phonological and morphological differences. However, it is a new vision to usepragmatic theories to study gender differences. As a face-threatening act，complaint is acommon speech act in human daily communication. Speaker always makes use of certaincomplaint realization pattern and complaint strategy to show his complaints anddissatisfaction, and then the hearer will show his attitude through certain response. Thus, theremust be gender differences in the process of choosing complaint realization patterns,complaint strategies and complaint-response strategies, and the thesis plans to examine thedifferences.The author adopts the quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the linguisticdifferences of complaints. Selecting Season Five and Season Six, The Big Bang Theory, awell-known sitcom in America as the corpus, the author collects258complaints as the basiccorpus and data base. By employing pragmatic theories which namely are Speech Act Theory,Politeness Principle (PP) and Face Saving Theory (FST), the author makes an analysis of thelinguistic differences of complaints. The thesis has its meaningful functions such as thefunction to promote the harmonious interrelationship between males and females, and thefunction to contribute a little to the development of the research of linguistic genderdifferences in complaints.After analyzing the data, it is obvious that when it comes to gender differences in theoverall distribution frequency, complaints which are made by females are obviously morethan those made by males. Direct complaints are employed more frequently than indirectcomplaints by both the genders.The results of the study can be presented in three levels, and they are as follows: (1) When it comes to gender differences in complaint realization patterns, females havethe tendency to employ interrogative sentence, declarative sentence to give complaints whilemales tend to make complaints through imperative sentence, and exclamatory sentence.(2) When it comes to gender differences in complaint strategies, the complaintstrategies like expression of annoyance or disapproval, explicit complaint are more frequentlyemployed by females, while males employ more accusation and warning strategies, andimmediate threats than females.(3) When it comes to gender differences in complaint-response strategies, males employmore disregarding of the complaint strategies and acceptance of the complaint strategies.Females tend to respond with rejection of the complaint strategies and partial acceptance ofthe complaint strategies.Finally, the thesis discusses and summarizes the reasons for linguistic genderdifferences and meanwhile points out the limitations existing in the thesis.