The Speech Act of Complaint on Social Media: A Case of #Epidemic in Shanghai

Abstract

 This article addresses the speech act set of online complaint and the directness on social media in China and takes the topic of the epidemic outbreak in Shanghai as the source of the corpus. 100 online complaints are collected and analyzed from the hashtag #Epidemic in Shanghai on Sina Weibo, a popular social media platform in China akin to Twitter. Several strategies are adopted to form the complaint, combing the speech act of request and insult. The most frequent used speech act set is complaint plus request. The study also finds that the complainer tends to address the complainee in an indirectly way, which is consistent with the face-to-face interaction.