The speech act of complaining in isiXhosa

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the speech act of complaining in Xhosa. It is organized into sixchapters.Chapter 1 states the aim of the study. The method, design and the organization of thestudy are also presented.In Chapter 2 the speech acts and politeness theories are presented as the basicframework of this study. It is clear that people do not only produce utterances, whichcontain grammatical structures and words when attempting to express themselves, butthey always perform actions via those utterances. The actions people perform via theirutterances are done in accordance within a certain area of linguistic pragmatics.Chapter 3 deals with the speech act of complaining as discussed by various theorists.Chapter 4 is concerned with complaints strategies. Here it is revealed that one must beable to voice one's annoyance or anger while at the same time it is important to avoidembarrassment by creating a situation in which it becomes impossible for him/her to facethe aversiveness of taking the blame.Chapter 5 deals with complaint situations in Xhosa. In order to make sense of what is saidduring an interaction, various factors have been examined, which relate to social distanceand closeness. The relative status of the participants is based on social values.Complaint situations are divided into three social groups: power relations, friendship andstrangers. Power relations involve people of superior and low status. This group isdivided into two subgroups: people with superior status to people with low status and viceversa; those speakers with a lower status in a Xhosa speaking context tend to mark socialdistance between themselves and higher status speakers.Among friends, there is no social distance because people tend to treat one another asequals. The same is true of strangers, although they don't know each other; they tend totreat one another with mutual respect.Most of the time complaints in Xhosa express disapproval or negative feelings towards thesource of the complaint. Complaints sometimes can be impolite. They can lead to conflictas they are sometimes very threatening, accusing and cursing. That is why a number ofstrategies have been introduced to a complainant who wants to avoid direct confrontationwith the complainee. The indirect accusation strategy is the number one tool, which isalways used by the complainers to avoid conflict, unlike annoyance, direct accusation andexplicit blame of the accused's action or of the accused as a person.People who use indirect accusations do not want to run the risk of losing face, unlike thedirect accusation, which is face-threatening. Responding to a complaint is also animportant factor as it promotes further interaction. Response serves as a way ofdisplaying interest in what the speaker is saying. It has been noticed that response givesthe speakers the opportunity to voice their feelings.Finally, Chapter 6 presents the conclusions of the investigation and the main findings ofthe study are summarized.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University