A Contrastive Study of American and Chinese University Students' Complaining Strategies

Abstract

This paper aims to make a contrastive study on complaining strategies between American and Chinese university students, based on the descriptive study of the collected data, with reference to the social variables of social status and social distance. It is found that Chinese and American university students are significantly different in the choice of complaining strategies produced to professors, intimates, friends and strangers. The Chinese show greater respect to professors than Americans do. Generally, as to interlocutors with equal social status, Americans' complaining degree displays a gradually descending tendency along a social distance continuum, while the Chinese have intimates and strangers at the both ends, with friends in the middle. No significant difference has been revealed in the choice of complaining strategies to parents, but Americans tend to be more polite than the Chinese. This challenges Brown and Levinson's formula, Wx = D (S, H) + P (H, S) +Rx, which implies the same weight for each of these three factors. The study proves that in private conversations, the variable of social distance carries more importance than the variable of social status.

本文以社会地位和社会距离为变量，通过小组座谈和调查问卷的方式收集语料，对比中美大学生选择抱怨策略的差异。文章发现,社会地位与社会距离对说话人语言形式的选择具有很强的制约性与调控性。中美大学生在对教授、知己、朋友、陌生人实施抱怨时均具有显著性差异。美国大学生对社会地位比自己高的教授采取更为直接的抱怨策略；在社会地位相当的情况下，随着社会距离的拉大，美国大学生的抱怨强度随之降低，而中国大学生则在社会距离连续统上呈现出两头高中间低的趋势：从知己到朋友,其强度随之下降,从朋友到陌生人则随之上升。文章提出在估算面子威胁行为因素时必须考虑到相对权势（社会地位）、社会距离、相对文化强加值三个因素的不同权重，在相对文化强加值等同的私人会话中，社会距离比社会地位拥有更高的权重。