| Since Austin proposed and Searle further developed speech act theories,many linguists have done a large deal of research on the speech acts.The speech act theory aimed to answer how to refer to things and to do things with the language.Searle(2001:16)held that the production of the symbol or word or sentence is the minimal unit of linguistic communication in the performance of the speech act.Then in order to comprehend how speakers use the language to do things,great interests have been aroused in the deep study of the speech act.The speech acts of apologies,requests,compliments,and refusals have been widely studied,whereas the speech act of complaints is of little concern.As one of face-threatening act(FTA),the complaint deserves deep investigation.With the development of speech acts research,some investigations on complaints have been done,but study on internal modifications used by Chinese college students when they perform the complaints has not received much attention.Thus,the study aims to compare the internal modifications of the speech act of complaints produced by Chinese college students.Participants involved in this study were divided into two groups: the first group was 154 Non-English majors students in Xi’an International Studies University and Xi’an University of Finance and Economics;the second group is 147 English majors students in Xi’an International Studies University.The instrument employed in this study was a 4-item discourse completion test(DCT)questionnaire,which was designed by Beebe et al.(1990).All subjects were asked to answer the questionnaire in the written form.Based on the coding manual offered by Blum-Kulka,House and Kasper(1981),the data was categorized and analyzed.The English majors’ complaints were compared with those of non-English majors so as to examine the similarities and differences of complaints.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one introduces the whole study.The second chapter presents literature reviews relevant to the present study,including Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness and Gu Yueguo’s politeness principle,and previous studies of speech act of complaints.Chapter three puts forward the methodology of the study,including subjects,design of the DCT questionnaire,coding category and procedures of the research.Chapter four analyzes the data collected by the questionnaire.Chapter five makes a conclusion about the major findings,implications for English learning and teaching,and practical suggestions for the further research. |
