A contrastive study of Chinese and American online complaints

Abstract Speech acts in CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) have been receiving increasing attention in recent years. This study attempted to make a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and American online complaints of restaurants from the perspective of speech act structure in relation to face management. In spite of likeness in the general taxonomy of retrospective and prospective speech acts between the two corpora, addressivity appeared to be a strong factor affecting how face was managed in the specific construction of complaints as speech act sets in the Chinese data set, while such a discrepancy was absent from the American reviews where the face of restaurants and fellow consumers was not handled with much distinction and discretion. These findings in terms of the level of sensitivity and adaptation to the context seem to imply that the generally-recognized distinction of high-context vs. low-context between the two cultures is also manifested in online reviews.