A Contrastive Study on Chinese and Japanese Degree-Modifying Strategies in Central Complaint Utterances

While both China and Japan are collectivist societies with a primary focus on maintaining social harmony, it remains uncertain whether they respond similarly in adversarial situations. This study examines the complaint speech acts produced by Chinese and Japanese speakers in a role-play scenario, focusing on their degree-modifying strategies when articulating their various intentions within complaints and the consistency of these strategies across different intentions.

The results show that both the Chinese and Japanese speakers generally employed less direct pragmatic strategies and degree-mitigating external modifiers when verbalizing the coercive intentions that threatened the addressee’s negative face. However, the Chinese speakers exhibited
more directness when the addressees’ negative face was less affected. In addition, the Chinese counterparts demonstrated fewer constraints in their external modifiers during less coercive intention verbalizations than the Japanese speakers.

These findings suggest that both Chinese and Japanese speakers are highly attuned to the addressee’s face in situations that pose significant threats to their negative face. Nevertheless, the Chinese speakers may display greater flexibility in expressing their complaints, in that they prioritize directness over face concerns when the threat to negative face is ambiguous or minimal,
even at the risk of disrupting conversational harmony. In contrast, the Japanese speakers would consistently aim to downplay the severity of the complaints.

This study underscores the complex nature of complaint dynamics and reaffirms the relevance of positive and negative face concepts within both Chinese and Japanese cultures, while also emphasizing the importance of contextual factors in face analysis.