A Contrastive Study Of Refusals In Chinese And American English

Refusing is one of the frequently used speech acts in daily life and also a face-threatening act to the face want of a refusee. It is a difficult speech act not only to non-native speakers but also to native speakers. Refusing is also one of the sources of failures and misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication. Many a scholar has done a lot of studies on it from the perspectives of politeness, second-language acquisition and pragmatics and many achievements have been obtained. But there are few researches finished on the speech act of refusing from a comparative perspective.The thesis tries to discover the rules that underline the fulfilling of refusals and to find the inherent differences in the refusals given by Chinese and American subjects in order to facilitate language-learner's learning and communication cross-culturally.Based on Austin and Searle's speech act theory, Brown&Levinson's face theory, Leech's politeness principle and other theories concerned in the discussion, the present thesis presents an investigation into the differences in refusals between Chinese and American and the correlations between context and refusal, distance and refusal and intimateness and refusal by using the tool of DCT. The data in the thesis come from questionnaires. They are composed of twelve situations which are of three invitations, three requests, three suggestions, and three offers. Different from previous studies, the present DCT was done by subjects according to their own past experiences. The data collected would be more consistent with the authentic responses compared with the previous studies in which subjects are asked to complete DCT by assuming that they are in a situation in which the relation between interlocutors is stated. After making a comparison and discussion of the data collected the conclusion reached are as following: (1) there indeed are some differences in the refusals of Chinese and Americans; (2) a majority of Chinese and American choose indirect refusals; (3) the refusals made by Chinese and American subjects are greatly affected by distance and intimateness between interlocutors; (4) the context in which a refusal is made also influences interlocutors'choice of refusals.