A Study On The Use Of Speech Act Of Complaints In Advanced Chinese-English Interlanguage

The well-known concept of"speech act"has been a popular topic for analysis in both first and second language learning since it is initiated by Austin and developed by Searle. The speech act theory aims to answer how the language is used to do things, in addition to referring to things. Searle (2001: 16) states that the minimal unit of linguistic communication is the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of the speech act. Thus the great interest has been aroused in the specific study of the speech act in order to understand how speakers use the language to do things such as complimenting, refusing, greeting, and apologizing, which have been widely studied, while the speech act of complaints are still left little concerned in the fields of cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics at home and abroad. Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) conducted a research in the realization of complaints in Hebrew and established five realization patterns through placing complaint realizations on five points along a continuum. Murphy and Neu (1996) made a contrastive study of complaints between English and Korean. Nakabachi (1996) examined the speech act of complaint cross-linguistically—Japanese L1 vs. EFL by Japanese speakers. While in China, few researchers have done a series of theoretical studies about complaint from different aspects.Thus, this study aims to compare the speech act components of Chinese advanced learners of English to that of English native speakers when performing the speech act of complaints. The sample of this study involves forty subjects: twenty of them are Chinese students pursuing postgraduate programs in English in Ocean University of China. The rest are native speakers of English from different English speaking countries.To generate data for this study, both English native speakers and Chinese advanced learners of English are given a"discourse completion test"in which they are requested to provide their natural responses to ten situations denoting the speech act of complaint. The subjects'complaint speech act sets are analyzed, using a coding schema from a previous study in the literature. Responses of the English native speakers are reviewed to identify common components of the target speech act to establish the baseline data. The responses given by the Chinese advanced learners of English are then compared to the baseline data to see to what extent they are similar and different, and whether there are any features unique to the interlanguage of the learners.The findings of the study show that the Chinese advanced learners of English produce a complaint speech act set in the given situations. The components of the complaint speech act set realized by the learners are"opener","orientation","act statement","justification of the speaker","justification of the addressee","request","remedy","threat","warn"and"closing", which are identical to that of complaint speech act set produced by the English native speakers. Besides these, the Chinese advanced learners of English use the components"societal justification"and"blame"which do not occur in the data of the English native speakers.