A Pragmatic Study Of Complaints Between Couples In Conflicting Context

Complaints cause conflict talk and lead to communication failures between husband and wife.The research on complaints is of great significance that cannot be ignored.However,it was not until the 1980 s that linguists turned their attention to complaints.Most of the existing complaints researches are comparative studies of two or more languages,and there is no lack of research on the implementation conditions,expression methods,pragmatic strategies and responses of complaint.No scholars have interpersonal pragmatic interpretation of complaints from a psychological perspective.This study takes the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey and the Language Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren as the theoretical basis,and builds the theoretical framework of “Rapport Management-Mental Adaptation Model of Complaints” from the pragmatic perspective of “Rapport Management-Mental Adaptation”.The present study aims at restoring the complainant’s conscious adaptation to mental world and behavioral expectation when implementing complaints,so as to carry out the dynamic process of discourse selection and achieve interpersonal functions.This study explores the collaborative relationship between mental adaptative mechanism,rapport-oriented motivations,and interpersonal functions,aiming to reveal the operating mechanism of the speech act of complaint.In communication,the complainant dynamically adapts to the mental world and the behavioral expectation of the complained,and selects specific discourses and language strategies in accordance with his/her rapport orientation from the language repertoire to achieve the desired severity of complaint so as to realize the specific interpersonal functions.Therefore,this study makes explanations from the following three aspects.This research uses the complaints between Luo Su and Bi Shengnan in TV series Tiger Mom as the corpus.First,it discusses the rapport orientations of complaint.Bythe comparison and analysis of corpus,it is found that the complaint between husband and wife include five rapport orientations: “rapport maintenance orientation”,“rapport enhancement orientation”,“rapport neglect orientation”,“rapport challenge orientation”,and “rapport neglect-challenge orientation”.The author makes some supplements on the basis of the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey.Secondly,the mental adaptative mechanism of complaint is discussed from the perspective of interpersonal relationship management.The personalities of the complainant,the communicative intentions of the complainant,and the affective factors all affect the generation of the complaint.Finally,the interpersonal pragmatic functions of complaint are discussed.Complaint mainly has four interpersonal pragmatic functions,namely: satisfying face needs,mitigating conflicts,expressing feeling and emotions,and building the discourse power.In summary,this study is an interpersonal pragmatic interpretation of complaint from a psychological perspective,aiming at revealing the operating mechanism and interpersonal functions of complaints,which is conducive to deepening people’s understanding of the complaint generative mechanism,and also provides a new research perspective for complaint research.