Comparison Of Chinese Direct Complaint Speech Act Used By Chinese And American

Direct Complaint Speech Act is a common "Face Threatening Act (FTA)", whose practise will influence the interperonsal relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and therefore, it is worth researching. Based on Politeness Principle and Face theory, this paper investigated 66 native-Chinese speakers and 60 American Chinese learners in their medium level for the use of Chinese Direct Complaint Speech Act through Discourse Completion Task and made analysis. In sum, the paper mainly discussed the following four aspects:(1) The strategies of Chinese direct complaint speech act commonly used by Chinese native speakers and American Chinese learners, and their differences;(2) The strategies of Chinese direct complaint speech act used by Chinese native speakers and American Chinese learners to different subjects, and their differences:(3) The microunit used by Chinese native speakers and American Chinese learners in their Chinese direct complaint speech act, and their differences;(4) The sentence patterns used by Chinese native speakers and American Chinese learners in their Chinese direct complaint speech act, and their differences.The results of complaint strategies are:in the 7 strategies of Chinese direct complaint specch act, chinese native speakers prefer the ones with lower complaint strengh while American learners will use the ones with high strengh or avoid complaining due to their lack of language knowledge. With the narrowing of social distance and increase of social status, the complaint strength of Chinese native speakers is higher and higher. But American learners will use higher level of complaint strength to acquaintances with the same social status than to other people.The results of microunits and sentense patterns are as follows. Most Chinese native speakers prefer to add microunits like politeness markers, adverb of degree and modal particles, especially for the sake of softening the tone. But American learners use much few microunits than Chinese and their vocabulary is small. In addtion, almost half of the Chinese direct complaint speech acts from Chinese native speakers are made up of sentence group. The auxiliary speech acts often used by Chinese native speakers include requests, parallel structures, softening words and explanations. But to American Chinese learners, they lack the capability to use these auxiliary speech acts expect for the parallel structures.