Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study On The Speech Act Of Refusal

Cross-cultural pragmatic research helps people from different cultures to have a better understanding of each other and to avoid pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication. In cross-cultural communication, learners of a second language need not only systematic linguistic knowledge but also sufficient pragmatic competence to achieve a successful outcome. To help the learners in this aspect, systematic cross-cultural research is called for not only in the fields of cultural diversity and pragmatic failures, but also in the learners'modes of acquiring and using the target language as well. Speech acts have been found to be the source of cross-cultural miscommunication, so studies on them have been attached great importance to and have constituted a major part of cross-cultural pragmatic research. When learners of a second language perform speech acts in this language, they always demonstrate some interlinguistic characteristics, which have attracted great interest of the pragmaticians and have turned out to be a major concern of interlanguage studies. The cross-cultural performance of the speech act of refusal requires special care in that any inappropriateness in it might either block the cross-cultural exchange or even jeopardize the interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors, resulting in an undesirable outcome. However, cross-cultural pragmatic study on this speech act that involves natives of Chinese, natives of English, and native Chinese learners of English as a second language still needs to be conducted since, to the extent of my knowledge, it remains rarely approached in China. The present study is a trial in regard to the cross-cultural sociopragmatic difference of the speech act of refusal, carried out with the instrument of experiment combined with descriptive analysis. Though politeness of speech acts is a universal phenomenon, its realization pattern varies from one speech act to another, and varies from culture to culture. The cross-cultural variation of politeness is mainly due to the diversity of pragmatic principles that are linked to the culture-based value orientation. Thus it was hypothesized that Chinese refusals and English refusals might on the one hand share something in common, but on the other hand would definitely distinguish from each other in respect of pragmatic principles due to the underlying cultural differences of these two languages; when Chinese learners of English as a second language perform the speech act in English, they might, more or less, demonstrate some interlinguistic characteristics which would distinguish their refusal production from that of either the Chinese natives or the English natives whereas resembling these two in some given aspects. The study adopted the Discourse Completion Test as the data collection instrument. The eliciting situations included requests, invitations, offers and suggestions, each pertaining to refusing an interlocutor of a higher status, a lower status and an equal status. The collected data included refusals in Chinese by Chinese university students majoring in courses other than English (CCs), refusals in English produced respectively by English natives (NEs) and Chinese university students majoring in English (CEs). To count and analyze the collected data, Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz (1990)'s taxonomy of refusals and their framework of cross-cultural comparison were employed. The results demonstrated that the three groups shared some features in that they all tended to prefer an indirect refusal in most cases and employed various remedial strategies,which attested to the existence of face-care, as Brown and Levinson (1978) proposed, in the speech act of refusal. Nevertheless, different characteristics were displayed. Compared with the NEs, the CCs presented more efforts to avoid direct strategies and appeared to be more sensitive to the relative status of their interlocutors, mainly reflected in their style-shift of the use of some politeness markers and the degree of specificity of excuses for refusing in accordance with the interlocutor's status, i.e., to provide specific excuses to a higher status interlocutor and relatively vague ones to a lower status interlocutor. Besides that, the CCs and the NEs demonstrated cultural difference in their preference for some semantic formulas and the content conveyed. For example, the CCs showed more favor than did the NEs for strategies such as postponement, offering alternatives and nonverbal avoidance. The CEs'production exhibited evidence of transfer of the Chinese sociopragmatic principles, mainly in their style-shift of the use of some politeness markers and the specificity of excuses according to the interlocutor's status and their employment of some semantic formulas seldom used or even never used in the NEs'refusals but frequent in the CCs'. The interlinguistic characteristics of the CEs'data were also represented by the CEs'increased tolerance to refusals, i.e., compared with the CCs, the CEs displayed more favor for direct refusals. The findings of the study will on the one hand help learners of either English or Chinese as a second language to understand the difference in the realization pattern and the underlying sociopragmatic norms between their native language and their target language when performing the speech act of refusal, hence to reduce the occurrence of breakdown and to ensure a successful outcome in cross-cultural exchange; and on the other hand, it is an effort to enrich the current cross-cultural pragmatic research of speech acts and to contribute some examples and support to the interlanguage research into the linguistic behavior of second language learners.