A Qualitative And Quantitative Study Of The Speech Act Of Criticism In The Chinese Context

The study of speech acts has been a main theme of discourse analysis for several decades. In China, a number of scholars have adopted this research paradigm as well. However, there is a severe shortage of research in the speech act of criticism both at home and abroad. The present research aims at making a complementary contribution to make up for this deficiency.Criticism is a face threatening act (FTA) which threatens the hearer's positive face. Therefore, the speaker tends to employ some strategies in expressing criticism. The first concern of this paper is to identify what strategies are used by interlocutors and to find out what strategies are preferred ones. The speaker and the hearer are sure to have a status relationship. The hearer is either higher than, or equal to, or lower than the speaker in status, or has an unknown status to the speaker. The second concern is to find whether there are some differences in strategy employment across different status relationship. To reach an in-depth understanding of strategy employment, the author, adopting Blum-Kulka's analysis model and centering on the variable of status, falls back on qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis of speech sequences within Brown and Levinson's theoretical framework. Data were collected from some college students with a discourse completion test (DCT) and a multiple-choice test. After the analysis, the study came up with the following major findings:1. Politeness plays an important role in communication, but it differs from faceand strategy. Politeness is a social norm which governs people's behavior, including linguistic behavior while face is a socio-psychological term which represents an individual's public image. However, even if the speaker employs a strategy, it does not mean he is polite to the hearer because some strategies are used to strengthen criticism, consequently further hurting the hearer's face.2. Semantic strategy, syntactical strategy and lexical strategy are jointly employed by interlocutors to soften or aggravate their criticism. To be specific, semantic strategies includes Grounder, Enquiry, Reminder, Direct, Irony, Consequence, Compliment, Demand, Alternative, Principle, Threat, Insult, Punishment, Guilt trip, Folk wisdom and Mixed use of strategies. Syntactical strategies consist of elliptical sentences, interrogative sentences, exclamatory sentences and imperative sentences in addition to declarative sentences. Lexical strategies are composed of downgraders and upgraders.3. The most frequent semantic strategy in expressing criticism is Enquiry. In SH conversation, Reminder plays a dominant role.4. The frequency of Don't do the FTA increases as the hearer's status increases. When a man is of an unknown status, people prefer to remain silent.In passing, the author points out the limitations of the present research and sets forthperspectives for future research.