A Pragmatic Analysis Of Complaints In English As L1 And As L2 And Chinese As L1

Since the advent of speech act theory in the 1950s, many pragmatists have diverted their attentions to studies of specific speech acts such as greetings, compliments, refusals, and apologies form the cross-cultural perspectives. However, the speech act of complaining has been left little touched in the field of cross-cultural and inter-language pragmatics both at home and abroad. Though there are some studies of the speech act of complaining, little work on comparison of the complaint strategies selections by Chinese and Chinese learners of English (CLE) complaining in English has been carried out. Accordingly, it is of great necessity to carry out a further contrastive study on complaint realization patterns by Chinese, CLE in English, and native English speakers.This thesis, through a cross-cultural study, aims at investigating the similarities and differences of complaint strategies employed by CLE in Chinese, CLE in English and native English speakers. Totally, 51 Chinese learners of English and 30 native English speakers, with some from America and some Britain, participate in this study. Data for this study was collected via a written questionnaire in the form of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The 51 CLE are asked to finish both the Chinese and English questionnaires. Ten situations are included in the questionnaire. Through the comparative analysis of data collected, the paper shows the frequencies and distributions of complaint strategies employed by CLE in Chinese, CLE in English, and native English speakers. According to the analysis on the data, it presents whether Chinese learners in English transfer their cultural norms to the target language communications when complaining in English. In this study, the Pearson Chi-square test has been used to find out whether there are significant differences in the complaint strategies selections among the three versions. In addition, according to Olshtain and Weinbach's pattern of complaint realization and Trosborg's complaint strategies, a new set of complaint strategies is presented in this paper, namely, below the level of reproach, opting out, expression of annoyance or disapproval, request for repair, explicit complaint and accusations and warning.On the basis of the comparative analysis on the complaint strategies used by CLE in Chinese and native English speakers, the results show that there are some similarities but more differences in complaint strategies selection in Chinese and English. Most of the Chinese and native English speakers tend to implement complaint in the ten situations. Due to the high-context collectivistic Chinese culture, where people place great emphasis on face and politeness, Chinese tend to adopt the complaint strategy of hints more frequently than native English speakers do in some situations. However, in the low-context individualistic western culture, where great emphasis has been played on 'self and 'freedom', when they decide to express censure native English speakers show greater preference to on-record complaint strategies without redress than Chinese do. However, according to the analysis on the English version of complaint by CLE, it reveals that CLE, when complaining in English, have acted more like Chinese people rather than native English speakers, though they have learned English for almost ten years. Thus, when communicating in English, CLE do transfer their cultural norms to the target language communication. This indicates when learners' native culture is quiet different from that of the target language, they would probably transfer their native cultural norms to target language communications.Based on these findings, this paper provides some helpful suggestions to English leaning and teaching, as well as cross-cultural communication.