| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 89 === The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental, situational, and sexual differences of using complaints in Mandarin Chinese as used in Taiwan by children, junior high students, senior high students, and college age students. Three aspects of complaints are examined: complaint types, complaint strategies, and complaint modifications. These three aspects are related to the use of the complaint and can determine the directness or indirectness scale of the complaint.
Two methods are adopted to collect the data for complaints: tape-recordings and questionnaires. Chi-square test is applied to test the data. The results are summarized as follows:
1.The use of complaint types and complaint strategies are different situations where the rights and the obligations of the complainer and the complainee are different.
2.There are developmental differences in the use of the complaint types. Elementary school students and junior high students prefer to use the strategies of Faced complaints or Non-faced complaints. However, senior high and college students often use the strategies of Faced complaints or Opting out. This result shows that the younger people are more inclined to ask the complainee to repair his/her offensive act, so they will use a more indirect means, such as all strive to Faced complaint or asking the third party to help them to reach this goal. Nevertheless, for maintaining social harmony, younger people by using Faced complaints, and older people by selecting Opting out in order to avoid a Face Threatening Act (FTA).
3.There are no developmental differences in the uses of Faced complaint strategies, but there are distinctions in the uses of Non-faced complaint strategies. Younger students prefer to ask their teachers for help, but older students select a Grumble strategy
4.Younger students use fewer impolite modifications than older students because of the psychological development or the density of their personal network structure.
5.In my data, the males use impolite complaints more than the females.
The results show that older students do not always use proportionally more indirect and polite complaints. The reasons for this surprising result may be that the social relationships of the students are very simple, whereas people in the work field face complex social relations, are more fully socialized, and therefore use more indirect and polite complaints.
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