A Study Of Refusal Strategies Used In Moment In Peking

The novel, Moment in Peking, was written in 1938. This fiction depicts the profound change of Chinese society during the two decades from the Boxers Uprising (1900) to Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) through the description of three large families in Peking-the Yao Family, the Tseng Family, and the New Family. The novel is not only regarded as a classic novel in describing modern Chinese society, but also as a masterpiece full of literary values.Many Chinese scholars have carried out studies on this novel from different perspectives such as the subjects of Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang's philosophy of life and the angle of the mixing of Chinese and Western cultures. In addition, comparative studies on different versions of Moment in Peking have been done. Yet very few have explored the novel from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis focuses on the speech act of refusal. Refusal is one of the complex speech acts that represent an inherent threat to the interlocutor's face. It is generally defined as the refusing act to the speakers' directives such as requesting, inviting, offering and suggesting. It requires a lot of techniques to convey the refusing intention and minimize negative effects of the face-threatening act. Therefore, it is highly necessary to make the speech act of refusal performed together with various strategies employed.The notion of indirectness is so inseparable to the most influential conceptualizations of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983) that there is a tendency in literature to reduce linguistic politeness theory to the simple formula: the more indirect, the more polite. The relationship between indirectness and politeness is explored in the thesis. Besides, the influence of refuser's social power and social distance on refusal strategies is also investigated.Based on the speech act theory and the politeness theory, the refusal strategies in the novel are analyzed through the exploration of the following problems. Firstly, what strategies are used in the speech act of refusal in the novel Moment in Peking? Secondly, what are the frequencies of the refusal strategies? Are there any observable and regular patterns in the usage between the refuser and the refusee according to certain types of social power and social distance? Thirdly, do the speech acts in the data conform to the current research on the relationship between refusals and indirectness? What kind of mitigating devices are used to weaken the illocutionary force in the utterances?All the utterances where refusals appear are categorized to explore the nature of politeness within Chinese culture. It is concluded that people employ some strategies to construct successful refusals; the use of refusal strategies is congruent with the formula "the more indirect, the more polite". People refuse politely by employing some mitigating devices whether they are internal modifications or external modifications.