Expression of dissatisfaction in Language Use as Reflected in Conflictual Family Situations in Contemporary Japanese Popular TV Series

The present research, mainly based on the speech act theory and the speech function theory, is intended to do a comprehensive analysis of expressions of dissatisfaction (EOD) in Japanese. In this study, data are collected from multiple Japanese TV dramas and analyzed in the typical way of discourse analysis. Firstly, based on the speech function and conversational implicature theories, EOD are divided into different types of speech acts, such as complain, accuse, request, abuse etc.. Secondly, EOD are redefined by the ‘purpose’ and ‘pragmatic conditions’ of it. In this process, the concepts of ‘interests’ and ‘subjectivity’ used by former researchers are inherited. And an original concept called ‘kurai/wei(status)’ is also applied in the redefinition of EOD in order to clarify the correlations between the speaker and the hearer. Thus, according to the new definition, the differences between EOD and other speech acts, and the category of EOD are stated detailed. Thirdly, around 1000 authentic examples of EOD are extracted from TV series and categorized into five different realization patterns, two of which have not been discussed yet in previous studies. Moreover, examples in each pattern are classified into different group by their grammatical features.