A Conversation Analysis Of Complaints In Daily Conversation

Complaining, acting as one of the most common social behaviors, extensively exists in natural conversations among people, and if given a thought, it is quite obvious that its target could be even more wide-ranging. Due to its vast existence, this social act has become the subject of study in various areas, and with the maturity of studies on complaints from the pragmatic and sociological view, conversation analysts have also set foot in this field.This thesis aims to illustrate how complaint is produced and carried out rather than how it is organized as an isolated phenomenon, since the central focus in conversation analysis is the organization of the meaningful conduct of people in society. One main purpose of this study is to study the sequential structure of natural conversation concerning complaint, and to discover the how structure and resources of natural conversation reflect speakers’ social knowledge and social identity.With the help of various recorded daily talk cases and a specific aim at the speech act complaint which exists in these talks, this thesis explores the conversational structure of complaints from the perspective of conversational analysis (CA). In this thesis, complaint sequence, as a bounded sequence, is divided into four phases:trigger, initiation, complaining and closure. General features within each phase, associated with different features manifested due to different identity of the complained-about, will be analyzed.