Chapter 1 Literature Review
1.1 Studies on Language and Gender
Despite the fact that the interrelationship between language and gender is a bitintricate, the two are closely relevant. Language and gender has already become a heatedsubject in sociolinguistics, and it has been investigated by numerous scholars all over theworld. The following paragraphs will illustrate previous researches on language andgender.The earliest study on language and gender could be traced back to the 17thcentury.Histoire Naturelleet Moraledes Iles Antillet which was written by Robnefort in 1665 isconsidered the earliest literature of gender language (cit. Sun Rujian, 2010). The bookrecords the phenomenon that Caribbean Indian men and women use different languages,but scholars do not pay much attention to this at that time. It was not until the 20thcenturythat the study of language and gender really drew linguists’ concern, even though in thatperiod the researches are fragmental and unsystematic. Otto Jesperson (1922), the famousDanish linguist, is the first scholar who commits himself to studying gender languagefrom the perspective of linguistics. He dedicates one chapter to give an account ofcharacteristics of women’s language in his book Language: Its Nature, Development, andOrigin, and talks over differences between males and females’ utterances in non-westernsocieties. Although the studies in this period were scattered, they laid the foundation forfuture exploration.
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1.2 SpeechAct Theory
As one of the most essential theories in pragmatics, speech act was first issued andexpounded by the English philosopher John Langshaw Austin in the 1950s and it wasfurther developed by his student John Rogers Searle. It has become a basic ingredient andexerted a profound influence on linguistic researches, especially on the research ofpragmatics since its appearance.According to Austin’s work How to Do Things with Words (1975), sentences used inreal life could be classified into two categories: performatives and constatives.Performatives are sentences which function as performing certain actions, such asclaiming, nominating, promising, etc. through uttering a few words, and they cannot bejudged in terms of truth or falsity, while constatives are propositions used to describe andreport and they can be said to be true or not. However, after further research, Austinrealized that these two kinds of sentences possess the same characteristics to some extent,and there is no clear linguistic criterion to distinguish them. Finally, he abandoned theprevious classification of performances and constatives and set up a new model instead.In the new model, he put forward that three kinds of acts are performed simultaneously in a complete utterance. They are locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Alocutionary act which is the basic action of an utterance is the process of producingsounds and words; an illocutionary act which is for stating speakers’ purpose clearly isthe act of doing something in utterance and it is performed via the communicative forceof an utterance; perlocutionary act is the effects of the utterance on the hearer.Furthermore, he classifies illocutionary acts into five kinds: commissives, verdictives,expositives, exercitives, and behabitives. According to his classification, complaint is akind of behabitives. However, it is not systematic, so his student Searle revised anddeveloped the theory later.
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Chapter 2 Research Methodology
2.1 Research Objectives
The research is concerned with Chinese complaint, and the objectives are as follows.1) To explore gender differences of complaint and strengthen the understanding ofcomplaint between Chinese couples in marital conversations.2) To help husbands and wives choose proper complaint realization patterns,complaint strategies and complaint-response strategies in order to maintain therelationship of couples.
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2.2 Research Questions
Previously, scholars mainly studied the speech act of c
