Investigating the Relationship Between Gender and Different Strategies of Expressing Complaint in English and Persian Films

The main objective of the present study is to elaborate the contrasts between males and females in their use of different strategies of complaint in English and Persian and ascertain the degree to which independent variables like gender and language affect the application of these strategies during informal communication. Furthermore, it offers comparable corpora which provide a good basis for cross-linguistic comparison of distribution of these functional strategies within the context of Persian and English movies. Therefore, the focus of this study is on the implementation of different strategies of ‘complaint’ by English and Persian males and females in accordance with Schaefer’s classification of strategies of complaint (1982). This research targets at figuring out differences between English and Persian males and females in relation to the application of the previously-mentioned strategies. In addition, in order to gather the most authentic data, four English and four Persian films, dealing with family and social theme, are analyzed with great care. Concerning gender dyads, both in English and Persian, some significant differences are detected. It is of significance to note that with regard to strategies of complaint, cross-language, Persian males and females implement complaining strategies more than English ones, while cross-gender, both in English and Persian, males use these strategies more.