A sequential study of female complaint speech acts in Desperate Housewives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54691/bcpssh.v17i.690Keywords:
Complaint, discourse analysis, sequence organization, pragmatics, television dramaAbstract
In daily life, face is the thing that people pay much attention to and they employ quite a few strategies to avoid the face-threatening acts of the interlocutors. However, complaint is a speech act that may cause potential threats to the hearer’s face. This paper takes the first season of Desperate Housewives as the research data, and analyzes the complex sequences of complaints uttered by the female characters in the television drama. Three groups of "pre-root sequence", "pre-root-post sequence" and "root-post sequence" are identified. The present study provides insights into the comprehension of female complaints, as well as the characteristics of female interactive styles and coping strategies.
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