MEANS FOR PERFORMING THE SPEECH ACTS OF COMPLAINING IN VIETNAMESE

Abstract

Complaining is an act the speaker uses to express his/her dissatisfaction or disapproval with a certain thing, or event that have a bad impact on himself/herself. Although this is an act that threatens the other person's face, this act often happens in everyday life.  Based on the collection of 408 utterances containing acts of complaining, of which 72 are commonly used means when performing complaining acts in Vietnamese on the corpus of Vietnamese literary works, we classify and point out the characteristics as well as their role and meaning in expressing the content of complaints and the purpose and attitude of users. The author of this study hopes to contribute more or less to the study and research of pragmatics  in general and Vietnamese in particular.