| Since Austin(1955) first put forward Speech Act Theory, there have been a great number of researches on it from different aspects, such as unsatisfaction, refusal, thanks, congratulation, etc.. As a usually kind of speech act in our daily life, the appropriate use of complaint and its proper responding play a significant role in the efficient and effective communication, to improve the communicative competence. Hence, complaint has been studied largely at home and abroad. House and Kasper(1981) made comparison between the complaints in English and that in German from the aspects of directness. Olshtain and Weinbach(1987) suggest that from the speaker’s point of view, some preconditions need to be fulfilled in order for the speech act of complaining to take place. And in Journal of Pragmatics in 2009, there are a lot of excellent theses on the study of complaints. Moreover, the scholars in China also make their efforts on the study of complaint, such as Liu Huiping(2004) makes a classification of different response patterns of complaint based on the study of others scholars, and Jin Yu(2005) makes a comparison of complaining among American natives, English learners whose mother tongue is Chinese, and Chinese natives. However, most studies focus their eyes on the comparison between English and some other foreign languages, for example, German, instead of paying attention to that of Chinese and English. Besides, the Discourse Completion Test(DCT for short) is often used by researchers, which results in that the objectives of tests are unilateral and the examples which are all from non-natural, designed languages are not very meaningful and useful for the communication in realistic life. Hence, the thesis tries to make a comparison between Chinese and American complaints on the basis of Culpeper’s impoliteness theory in terms of the data collected from their sit-coms, including:(1) to analyze and discuss the complaint phenomena based impoliteness strategies(IS for short);(2) to explore its intercultural communication. In terms of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in this research. Applying Impoliteness Theory into the analysis of the different complaints and the reasons for these differences are qualitative. And it is quantitative because the research is data-based analysis, collecting corpus from Chinese sit-com Love Apartment and American sit-com Friends. The data this paper collected are from Chinese sitcom Love Apartment and American sitcom Friends. These two sitcoms tell the stories which happen among friends who live in the same apartment together. In order to highlight the antagonistic complaints, the writers arrange complaints in an artful way, thus to some degree. Therefore, for the study’s convenience, this paper selects all the episodes of the first season respectively as my corpus. The major findings of this paper are as follows: according to Culpeper’s Impoliteness Theory and the Impoliteness Strategies of Culpeper’s and Bousfield’s, it is found that Chinese would rather indirect speech act while Americans prefer direct speech act, in detail, Chinese use more off record impoliteness strategies, like excluding the other from an activity, being disinterested and unconcerned, etc. while Americans use more on record impoliteness strategies, such as threatening, criticizing, sarcasm, etc.. |
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