An Investigation On Speech Act Of Direct Complaints In Chinese Carried Out By Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Learners

Complaining speech act is carried out when individual A expresses displeasure at the unsatisfactory behavior of individual B,which is a typical Face-Threatening Act.Direct complaining speech act means that the complainer directly performs the complaining speech act in the presence of the complainant,which has the greatest impact on the interpersonal relationship between the two parties.After a preliminary survey of some Chinese learners,the author found that even advanced Chinese learners who have been studying in China for many years sometimes cannot properly implement direct complaining speech acts in Chinese.At present,there are few studies on complaining speech acts in second language acquisition,and all of them focus on English learners with various mother tongues to perform direct complaining speech acts in English.However,researches on Chinese learners with different mother tongues who use Chinese to perform direct complaint speech acts are even rarer.Based on the research status,using Speech Act Theory,Politeness Principle,Face Theory and Communication Theory as the theoretical basis,with the help of a Discourse Completion Test,the author studied how 68 native speakers and 78 intermediate/advanced Chinese learners use Chinese to implement direct complaints,and made comparison.In terms of syntax and rhetoric,the author found out that intermediate Chinese learners are willing to use single sentences,while advanced Chinese learners and native speakers choose sentence groups.Intermediate and advanced Chinese learners have the awareness of applying idioms and rhetorical devices to complain directly,but the types they use are generally not as rich as native speakers.In terms of speech acts,the author found that intermediate Chinese learners used less complaint primes and could not use "degraded" and "upgraded" at the same time,which led to more direct complaints.At the level of strategy selection,intermediate Chinese learners are more inclined to adopt single strategy,while the other two groups mostly choose combined strategies.The average complaint intensity of advanced Chinese learners is the highest among the three groups,while that of intermediate Chinese learners is the lowest.The three most common complaining strategies used by intermediate and advanced Chinese learners are more direct than those used by native speakers.In addition,the author also searched the related language materials related to complaining speech acts in the comprehensive,spoken and listening textbooks at different levels of Developing Chinese,and combined with the investigation of complaining speech acts in HSK(Chinese Proficiency Test),conducted a research on Chinese complaining speech acts from two perspectives of "teaching" and "testing".The author found that all levels of HSK tests involve Chinese complaining speech acts,mainly in intermediate and advanced levels(HSK4 to HSK6).In terms of question type,most of them are listening questions,accounting for about 65%.In the comprehensive,oral and listening textbooks of Developing Chinese,there are a wide range of Chinese complaining speech acts and a variety of strategies used,but the corpus of direct complaints about speech acts using combined strategies is far less than that using only one strategy.