A Pragmatic Study Of The Speech Act Of Complaining In Chinese

Since the advent of speech act theory in the 1950s, linguists have done a great deal of research on the speech acts of requests, apologies, compliments, and refusals. The speech act of complaining is an important research subject of pragmatics, which is worthy to be researched among speech acts. With the development of research into speech acts, some scholars have done some investigations of complaints,but they do little work on Chinese complaints. Therefore, it is necessary to make a further study on complaint as speech act in Chinese.The present thesis,based on the speech act theory and politeness principle, is intended to do an empirical study on the speech act of complaints in Chinese. It aims to find out how the complaints are realized in Chinese, what kinds of pragmatic strategies people use in complaints realization, what the response patterns of the complaints are and what the functions of the complaints perform in Chinese? In this study, data are collected via notebook approach and responses to a discourse completion questionnaire based on the form of modified DCT. In the process of data analysis, qualitative method is adopted in the present research. The research result indicates that the most frequent complaint strategy used by Chinese is the strategy of expression of disapproval or annoyance. The frequencies of opting out and explicit complaint are relatively high. As far as complaint-responses are concerned, it is found that the proportion of using disregarding the complaint becomes higher as complaint severity increases in direct complaint, which indicates that more severe complaints cause harsher reactions in the type of disregarding the complaint in Chinese. Complaining can function as a conflict tactic that is used to demand reaction from the listener. Moreover, it can be used as opener or small talk to build solidarity among people.Based on the findings, this paper reinforces the research of complaining speech act and suggests some pedagogical implications to foreign language teaching and cross-cultural communication.