A Contrastive Analysis Of Complaining In Chinese And American English

Language and culture are inseparably intertwined. Different cultural backgrounds exert subtle influence on communication. Complaint is a common linguistic phenomenon as well as a cultural phenomenon in different cultures. Broadly speaking, complaint is the expression of one's dissatisfaction with others. Complaint is defined as a speech act, in which "the speaker expresses displeasure or annoyance-censure-as a reaction to a past or on-going action, the consequences of which are perceived by speaker as affecting him/her unfavorably. This complaint is usually addressed to the hearer, whom the speaker holds, at least partially, responsible for the offensive action"(Olshtain & Weinbach, 1993: 108). Therefore, it is intrinsically a face-threatening act. Politeness strategies are usually used to impair or reduce the face-threatening force. Based on Leech's Politeness Principle, Brown & Levinson's Politeness Strategies and complaint studies by Olshtain & Weinbach's (1987, 1993), the thesis deals with a contrastive analysis of complaints in Chinese and American English. From a cross-cultural perspective, the contrastive analysis of Chinese and American complaint realization aims to explore the cultural values hidden behind the complaint differences and also cultural values playing significant roles in realization of complaint speech act. Therefore, to gain successful cross-cultural communications, not only must language learners have language competence (grammar and words), but more importantly they have to develop communicative competence. Acquiring communicative competence is an important goal in language instruction. In the course of English language teaching, the teachers are supposed to enable the students to communicate effectively and appropriately; and students should pay particular attention to cross-cultural differences, so as to reduce communicative failure. Accordingly, a contrastive analysis is necessary, through which students'/learners'awareness of cross-cultural differences can be increased and communicative competence can be enhanced. Language data are collected by means of questionnaires, i.e. a written discourse completion task, which consists of five situations involving interlocutors with equal or unequal social status. 150 participants fall into two groups, namely, native speakers of American English (50) and native Chinese speakers (100). The thesis, as a whole, contains six chapters excluding the introduction and conclusion. The introduction serves as a lead-in of the research topic. The method of contrastive analysis is presented and then the purpose of the study follows. In the end, the organization of the thesis is offered. In Chapter one, complaint speech act is defined on the basis of previous researches. The status quo of complaint study is proposed, mainly focusing on foreign contrastive studies (Olshtain & Weinbach, 1987, 1993; Beth Murphy & Joyce Neu, 1995; etc.) Chapter two explores the relationships between complaint and culture. First the definitions of culture and language are given respectively, and then their relationship is under examination, which comes to the conclusion that language is the vehicle of culture, and that language reflects culture and is reflected by culture. The chapter ends with a confirmed argument that complaint, as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon, mirrors social values. Chapter three reviews politeness theories at home and abroad by putting complaint speech act into the framework of politeness theories. First to be discussed are three major politeness theories, i.e. Leech's Politeness Principle, Brown & Levinson's Politeness Strategies and Gu's politeness theory. Considered next is the relationship between politeness and culture. Politeness in a given society is shaped by culture to which it belongs.