A Cross-cultural Study of Complaint Strategies by Chinese and British University Students

摘要

Since we live in a world in which unexpected and unreasonable things occur from time to time, people complain in various settings in divergent forms every day. However, complaining has been a rather under-researched speech act in cross cultural pragmatics [1, 2, 3]. Very little is known about the similarities and differences in the choices of complaint strategy and realization patterns of the act made by native speakers of Chinese and of British English. This study investigates the complaint strategies by Chinese university students and their British counterparts. Thirty Chinese students and thirty British students participated in the study. The data were elicited through Background Questionnaire and Discourse Completion Tests (DCT). The overall findings of the current study indicate that there were mainly similarities in the pragmatic behaviour of the native and non native speakers who participated in the research project, with a few minor differences.