A Study Of The Realization Patterns Of Complaint By Native Americans And Chinese Learners Of English

Since the advent of speech act theory in the 1950s, many speech acts have been studied cross-culturally. This thesis aims at investigating the differences and similarities in the realization patterns of complaint between native Americans and Chinese learners of English. The author attempts to analyze the speech act of complaint and its interlanguage features on the basis of former researches. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the current research. Data are collected via responses to a discourse completion questionnaire based on the form of DCT. The research result indicates that the Chinese learners of English employ strategies for performing the speech act of complaint similar to those of the native Americans. But in some specific situations, differences arise in terms of the degree of indirectness. Some other interlanguage features are found through the data we collected from our respondents. Learners place more emphasis on the relationship between two interlocutors; they tend to moralize in many situations; they use more expressions of understanding as softening device. Excessive supply of words is typical of learners at the intermediate level.