A Conversationally Analytical Study Of Complaint As An Indirect Directive

Linguists have done a lot of research on such speech acts as requests, apologies and refusals since Austin and Searle proposed their speech act theories. But the study of complaints, as a significant research subject of pragmatics, has not received enough attention from the perspective of the speech act theory.Based on the Speech Act Theory the paper has analyzed the authentic data taken from a Chinese TV play series Divorce Lawyers with the help of Conversational Analytical approach, and has come to the conclusion that complaints that occur in everyday communication are in nature directive acts, or at least indirect directive acts, rather than expressive acts as traditionally understood. This has not only revised the traditional misunderstanding of complaints by scholars at home and abroad, but also helped enhance our communication skills.The study shows that in making a complaint, the intention of the complainer is to make the hearer stop an ongoing action which is hurts the speaker, or to make some compensation for the loss or damage done to the complainer in the past. From the point of view of emotion, what a complaint expresses is some negative feeling; but from the cognitive point of view, it is quite subjective. The purpose, or the illocutionary point, of the speaker, is to let the hearer feel guilty and remorse so as to let the hearer realize what a big mistake he/she has done and then correct it. In terms of the felicity conditions, the intention of the speaker is to get the hearer to do something; In terms of the direction of fit, it is the world to words; In terms of the conversational structure, it is a pre-sequence to the conversation proper. On the basis of these characteristics, we arrive at the conclusion that a complaint is a directive act, or a request, but not an expressive act in nature. An understanding like this can well explain why some complainers would continue with the complaint if the first one is not satisfied, and why some complaint can increase in intensity and develop into chorus or even bodily disputes. It can also explain why some complaints can decrease in intensity and are finally given up altogether.