With the development of speech act theory, great interest has been shown in the study of specific speech acts such as greetings, compliments, refusals and apologies, and many comparative studies have been made in terms of the different kinds of speech acts mentioned above. The speech act of complaining, however, is left little touched in the fields of cross-cultural and inter-language pragmatics both at home and abroad.
Complaints are common in daily communication, and the speech act of complaining occurs when a speaker reacts with displeasure or annoyance to an action that has affected the speaker unfavorably. Different scholars have defined complaints in different ways. Olshtain and Weinbach (1993:108) define complaint as a speech act where "the speaker (S) expresses displeasure of annoyance-censure as a reaction to a past or on-going action, the consequences of which are perceived by S as affecting her unfavorably. This complaint is usually addressed to the hearer (H), whom the speaker (S) holds, at least partially, responsible for the offensive action". In Trosborg's (1995) work, the complaint is viewed as a speech act performing expressive function. "A complaint is an illocutionary act in which the speaker (the complainer) expresses his/her disapproval, negative feelings etc. towards the state of affairs described in the proposition (the complainable) and for which he/she holds the hearer (the complainee) responsible, either directly or indirectly." It can be seen from the definition that an effective communication will be established when a proper complaint strategy is used by the speaker, and that the hearer's face might be threatened if the speaker fails to perform the speech act of complaining in an appropriate way. In addition, complaint-responses from complainees have emerged as a new subject of study in recent years. Unfortunately, very few scholars have studied in this field.
As a common feature of everyday interactions, it is troublesome for native speakers to perform the speech act of complaining in cross-cultural communication settings. It is therefore necessary to study how native Chinese speakers and native English speakers perform the speech act of complaining and respond accordingly. A broad range of types of speech acts have been developed over the last two decades, and a great deal of research has been done on the speech acts of apologies, requests, compliments, and refusals, while fewer studies of complaints, especially complaint-responses, have appeared in the literature.
Scholars both in England and China have conducted some studies of the speech act of complaining since 1980s (House and Kasper(1981), Olshtain and Weinbach (1987), De Capua(1989), Boxer (1993), Murphy and Neu (1996) Trosborg (1995), Arent (1996), Nakabachi (1996), Tatsuki (1999), Laforest (2002), Zhao Yingling (2003), Liu Huiping (2004), Li Ping (2006)). But most of these studies refer to the comparative analysis between English and other languages, such as English and German, English and Hebrew, and very few studies have been made to compare complaints and their responses in English and Chinese. That's the major reason why the present thesis is devoted to a comparative study of complaints and complaint-responses in English and Chinese.
The study
The study aims to identify similarities and differences of realization patterns used in complaints performed by native English and Chinese speakers respectively. The data are collected through written questionnaires by native Chinese speakers and native English speakers. This thesis is composed of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One covers a review of previous studies of complaints and their responses. Chapter Two concerns the methodology of the study, which contains research design, subjects, instruments, contextual variables and research procedure. Chapter Three presents the findings and analysis of results concluded from the material. Similarities and differences of complaint strategies in English and Chinese are summarized in this chapter. Chapter Four is devoted to a cultural investigation into factors causing such differences.
Objectives
This study aims to make a comparative study of complaints in English and Chinese through language use by students from English and Chinese university by means of analyzing the results of questionnaire, and the effects of contextual variables such as social status, social distance, social contract and level of S's expectations on the realization of complaints and their responses. The main issues to be addressed throughout the study are:
(1) Similarities and differences of complaints and their responses in English and Chinese, and the kind of complaints and their responses English and Chinese students choose to adopt in specific situations.
(2) Whether the contextual variables affect the selection of complaint realization patterns in English and Chinese.
(3) Whether the complaint severity has any influence on the responses to complaints
Hypothesis
Since Chinese people are thought to be collectively oriented and English individually oriented, it is believed that the relationship between social variables and discourse pattern selections must be distinct, and it is therefore hypothesized that the choice of complaints and their responses between American and Chinese students display the following differences that needs to be further studied in this paper.
Hypothesis 1: Complaint strategies are different in English and Chinese.
Hypothesis 2: Complaints performed in English and Chinese are different in the same context, and contextual variables influence the selection of complaint realization patterns.
Hypothesis3: Cultural factors are closely associated with the differences of complaints in English and Chinese.
Participants
A total of 60 participants have participated in the research program, of which 30 are native Chinese speakers and 30 native English speakers. The 30 native Chinese speakers are all college students in China aged between 20 and 25. Among the 30 native English speakers, 16 are college students in the United States of America. 14 of them are studying or teaching in China less than half a year. The native English speakers' ages range from 20 to 26.
There are 17 males and 13 female native English speakers and 15 male and 15 female native speakers respectively in the Chinese group. The two groups consist of majority of bachelors except for several postgraduates, and they are all pursuing their degrees. Each one in the two groups will be asked to respond to the written questionnaires consisting of seven situations for complaints and seven situations for complaint-responses.
Methodology
The research data were collected via a written questionnaire, and the discourse completion tasks are employed by the writer in the study. According to Zhu et al (2000:82), research methods used in cross-communication fall into two classes: transport and test approach, and explore and discover approach. In the former, “examples are cited from a variety of cultural contexts and differences between them highlighted.†The latter requires us to keep our eyes open for novel aspects of cultural-bound human behavior, even when we do find support for the generality of the phenomena we study. The method adopted in this paper belongs to the first class because of time restriction, research objectives, and concrete research situations.
The ideal data for speech act analysis usually consist of a large number of carefully recorded observations of particular speech acts by representative subjects and control group subjects in similar natural situations when the subjects are unaware of the observation. This point of view is echoed by Wolfson (1981:9) who claims that the best approach is to collect samples of spontaneous speech through observation and participation, where the participants are unaware of being observed or studied. However, the data collected through this approach are not adequate for making a situational comparison besides its time-consuming (Olshtain and Cohen 1983). Moreover, legal and ethical considerations aside, logically, it would be very difficult to accumulate sets of data of this sort. Beebe (1992) also argues that ethnographic data and notebook data are often unsystematic. Therefore, the researchers have employed some other methods of gathering data. But a major concern of every serious researcher is that to what extent the results obtained through these methods can represent the actual situations. Hence the validity of methods and instruments appropriate for eliciting particular speech act data has been widely discussed.
Ever since their first systematic and extensive use in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realizations Patterns (CCSARP) Projects in 1989, the written discourse completion tasks have been adopted to collect data in a large number of empirical pragmatics studies. DCTs, also called production questionnaires, present a situation where a certain kind of speech act is expected, and the respondents are asked to provide what they think would be appropriate in that situation. They can be open-ended or accompanied by a reply. In the view of Beebe (1992), providing hearer response can limit the elicited speech acts and bias the results. Therefore, an open-ended form is used in the present study.
The main attraction of questionnaires is their efficiency in terms of research time, research effort, and financial resources and they can be used with a variety of people in a variety of situations targeting a variety of topics.
Based on the discussions above, two reasons explain why the DCT is considered a suitable research tool for this particular study. The first reason is it can create a sound template of the stereotypically perceived requirements for socially appropriate responses in the groups studied. The second reason is that it enables the researcher to obtain sufficient data in a relatively short period of time.
Variables
Situations
Status of S
relative to
H
Social
distance
Social
contract
Level of S's
expectations
1
equal
small
implicit
low
2
equal
small
implicit
low
3
equal
small
implicit
low
4
equal
large
explicit
low
5
low
kin
implicit
high
6
high
large
explicit
low
7
low
mid
nonexistent
low
Procedure
Step 1 Listing realization patterns of English complaints and Chinese complaints.
Step 2 Analyzing and comparing the realization patterns in English and Chinese complaints.
Step3 Analyzing the similarities and differences between English complaints
