Indirect Complaints Between English And Chinese From A Cross-cultural Perspective

Speech act theory was first put forward by J. L. Austin in1962, and further developed by Americanlinguist J. R. Searle in1969. So far, many linguists have made great efforts on the study of the speech actsof apologies, compliments, refusals and requests. Different from those well-defined speech acts, complaint,especially indirect complaint has been little studied in the area of cross-cultural and interlanguagepragmatics. The authors, who studied the speech act of complaint, mainly confined to these three aspects:grammar, rhetoric and pragmatics. However, few findings were made from the cross-cultural perspectives.Therefore, it is quite essential to make a further contrastive study on complaints between English andChinese from a cross-cultural perspective. This study should be valuable and worth doing.Different from other researches, this thesis focuses on the study of the realization patterns andresponse strategies of indirect complaints based on a cross-cultural perspective. In this study, a total of40Americans and Chinese were recruited and asked to fill out a discourse completion text (DCT) containing10different indirect complaining scenarios. According to the data that have been gathered, the nativeEnglish speakers (NEs) and native Chinese speakers (NCs) shared similar and different distributionstowards the strategies of realization patterns and response strategies. The result generally indicates that NCsgroup takes more indirect strategies than NEs group. In order to establish group harmony andinterdependence in relationships, Chinese people tend to maintain harmonious relationship with each otherand save face for others. While NEs group chooses to make their own decisions and individualism becomeeven more important for them.The reasons that caused these similarities and differences are respectively analyzed and discussed indetails. It is because the different cultural value systems and context culture that causes these differences.As for cultural value systems, Americans grow up in an individualism-oriented culture, which concentrateon an independent self. People in this group pay much more attention to their personal rights. WhileChinese people are group-oriented and Chinese culture is generally considered as a collectivism-orientedculture. They show absolute loyalty to their group and group demands as their personal goals. When culturehas been taken into consideration, China is a typical country with a high context culture. People in thissociety would like to talk in a roundabout way in order to establish harmony within the group by keepingthe existing relationship among different people. However, people in low context culture tend to use moredirect and positive politeness in their daily communication. In short, in order to perform complaint strategies appropriately, comprehending the differences ofindirect complaint strategies between Chinese and Americans and the underlying cultural differences willbe useful. It’s no doubt that achievements of contrastive study between two different cultures will beconducive to linguistic research in the future.