The Conversational Analysis Of Talking Mode And Characteristics Of Chinese Complaint Calls

Complaint is a common communicative activity in which the complainer expresses his dissatisfaction to the recipient who should be responsible for his or her loss. It is considered as a very important speech act which greatly influences the relationship among people. Therefore, many scholars have studied the subject in different areas, such as psychology, sociology, economics, and so on. The classification and relative research areas of complaint are also discussed. In this thesis, the structural organization and language characteristics are analyzed in details after the former researches being summed up and classified. Also, some other elements are introduced as supplementary means to analyze the corpus.In the stage of collecting corpus, many corpuses were recorded in daily casual talk at working place, at dormitory, and at home. Some of them were found on the internet. To keep the unity of the thesis, only the records of complaint calls which were collected from the internet has been analyzed in this thesis. Compared with the face to face communication, the specific phone call complaints are more typical. The whole process can be divided into three parts-the opening sequence, extending sequence, and closing sequence. In each part, the structure and characteristics are analyzed.The thesis is started from the review of the former definitions, and then a relatively adequate definition is given as the offside scope of this study. The most important views and theories are introduced in this thesis. And in the thesis, the ones which are relevant to conversation analysis are focused on. For example, many researchers have studied some patterns of complaining and tried to find some regular patterns to form a system. There are some researches was studied in the domain of pragmatics, but was only used as a tool to deal with communication problems in medical setting. For example, the studies in commercial settings were done with the aim of coping with problems, such as easing the conflicts between customers and sellers. However, the subject was researched in different branches, and there is not any comprehensive study results which were done in pure language analysis, though the most important part of a complaint progressed by language. Most of their fruits help a lot in this thesis. To analysis the complaint calls, a structural talking mode is needed which can make the characteristics of complaint easy to be discovered. The methodology of conversation analysis is mainly used to analyze the corpus. As commonly used in CA (Conversation Analysis), the theories of turn-taking mechanism, sequence organization, repairing, and story-telling are used as the main means to analyze the corpuses. A much important element-stance-is used to analyze the complaint activity. The thesis is focused on the characteristics of language using and sequence organization. During the analysis, some interesting phenomenon and talking strategies are discovered.After constantly reviewing and creating, a relatively systematic talking mode of complaint calls is established. This thesis was done with the aim of establishing a relatively comprehensive methodology of corpus analysis of the sequence organization and characteristics so that it can be used in the future studies.