Yang, Myunghee, Yoo, Yang & Moon, Grace Ge-Soon. 2014. A Study of the Complaint Speech Act by Chinese Office Workers in Korea: With Focus on High-Level Strategies. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). The present study examines the use of the speech act of complaint in Korean by Chinese office workers in Korea, with particular focus on their use of high-level strategies. By looking at the differences in speech act between Korean-speaking Chinese office workers and native Korean office workers from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective, the study aims to shed light on intercultural differences and explore their implications for Korean language education. High-level strategies in the speech act of complaint are broadly classified into direct, indirect, mixed, and silent strategies. By means of a discourse completion test (DCT), 50 Chinese office workers and 50 Korean office workers were surveyed with respect to their use of the complaint speech act. The results indicated that Chinese office workers tend to use more indirect strategies than their Korean counterparts and that Korean office workers use the silent strategy more often than Chinese workers. Significant results were also obtained by comparing the use of high-level strategies by the two subject groups according to variables such as social status, familiarity, age, gender, and employment period.

• 유양(중앙대) | Yoo, Yang 주저자
• 양명희(중앙대) | Yang, Myunghee 교신저자