Semantic Analysis of Direct Oral Complaints in Indian English: A Study in Gender Performance

Main Article Content

Dr. Jyoti Jayal

Abstract

Empirical and ethnographic researches have proved speech acts to be semantically formulaic. Complaint as one of the most face-threatening speech acts (Brown and Levinson, 1978) appears to be the least researched speech act in terms of semantic formula. The paper focused upon identifying semantic discourse components prevailing in the direct oral complaints in Indian English articulated by the native speakers of Hindi that mitigated the impact of the face-threatening act, and made it more solution oriented. Moreover, the paper aimed at exploring the intra-cultural gender differences in the verbal and linguistic behaviour exhibited by the native speakers of Hindi while performing the speech act. In order to elicit data for the research, two hypothetical situations were designed based on the “solidarity politeness system” (Scollon and Scollon, 2001, 55). The respondents of the present study were male and female students, 18 to 24 years of age, enrolled in a four-year undergraduate program offered by Engineering colleges in Greater Noida, affiliated to UP Technical University, Uttar Pradesh. Being a native speaker of Hindi, their level of proficiency in spoken English was evaluated as intermediate and pre-advance. In the view of studying the role of gender in the selection of semantic formulae, the complaint tokens produced by the respondents were tape recorded through an oral discourse completion task (DCT). The complaint realizations were coded according to Schaefer’s (1980) semantic moves to perform a comparative gender study of the verbal and linguistic behaviour in the articulation of direct oral complaints in Indian English.


  

Article Details

Section
Articles