Complaint Strategies In Chinese And American English

Since Austin and Searle raise their own speech act theories, linguists have done agreat deal of research on the speech acts of requests, apologies, compliments, andrefusals. The speech act of complaining is an important research subject of pragmatics,which is worthy to be researched among speech acts. With the development ofresearch into speech acts, some scholars have done some investigations ofcomplaints,but they do little work on Chinese and American complaints. Therefore, itis necessary to make a further contrastive study on complaints between Chinese andAmericans.This paper investigates the similarities and differences of complaint strategiesused in Chinese and American English by conducting a cross-cultural study oncomplaints. Fifty Chinese native speakers and thirty native speakers of AmericanEnglish participated in the study. Data for this study was collected via a writtenquestionnaire in the form of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). Eleven situationsfor complaint are included in the questionnaire. According to the data we havecollected, seven complaint strategies are defined in the thesis and the use of the sevencomplaint strategies by Chinese and Americans across eleven situations arerespectively analyzed and discussed in detail. The effects of contextual variables oncomplaint strategy selection are examined. The contextual variables include socialpower, social distance, contract and the level of speaker's expectations. Averagefrequencies of complaint strategies per item by each contextual variable according tothe two groups are conducted to see how contextual variables are related to the choiceof complaint strategies.The most general finding is that there are some similarities but more differenceson the use of complaint strategies in Chinese and American English. Both Chineseand Americans tend to perform complaints in given situations. Chinese useoff-record strategies most frequently while Americans use redress most frequently. Ingeneral, the frequencies of request for repair, opting out and explicit complaint arehigh in the two languages. But the strategy of hints is the most frequent strategy usedby Chinese and request for repair is the most frequent strategy by Americans. Socialpower, social distance and contract show significant relations with complaintstrategies used by Chinese while American complaints don't show significant...