A Pragmatic Study Of Refusals In English

Refusal, as an indispensable part in interpersonal communication, is an universal but sensitive uncooperative speech act in daily life. Due to its nature of threatening communicators' face,it needs both the speaker's cautious disposition and the hearer's exact interpretation, which makes a high demand for communicators' pragmatic competence.Scholars both at home and abroad have done various research on refusal speech act,mainly from the perspective of pragmatics, sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. And the research content ranges from refusal pattern, formulaic exploration,classification of refusal strategies, transfer to influencing factors. However, most of these studies simply list and describe corpus lacking a systematic classification of refusals.Besides, when analyzing factors influencing the selection of refusal strategies, the focus is mainly on social status, social power and cultural variables while neglecting the role of communicators. What's more, the research method is confined to Discourse Completion Test(DCT). And research participants are mainly college or university students, which may lead to limitations of research to some extent. Therefore, the present study selects Desperate Housewives - an American drama close to American middle-class real life as the research data, and studies four hundred refusals in all eight seasons aiming at further exploring the expressions, components and strategies of English refusal speech act, as well as its influencing factors. The research combines quantitative and qualitative method and puts forward several research questions as follows:(1) How can English refusals be made and what are their components?(2) What are English refusal strategies used in the data? What are the differences in the frequency of these refusal strategies?(3) What contextual factors have affected the application of different refusal strategies?Based on Russian linguist Frolkina's new achievement on conversational implicature, the present study makes a detailed classification of English refusals at sentential level and contextual level. And the study comes to a conclusion that refusals can be achieved through lexical means, syntactic means, suprasegmental means,contextual and cultural means, logical means and strategical means. And through a careful observation and analysis, components of English refusals are summarized as central speech, auxiliary speech and adjunct. Based on Brown & Levinson's politeness theory, refusal strategies are categorized as five types: bold on record, positive politeness,negative politeness,doing an FTA off record and don't do the FTA. Through the statistics of use frequency of various strategies, it's found that direct refusals as well as excuse/reason/explanation, dissuasion and avoidance in the indirect refusals are most frequently employed. In addition,the research finds: (1) Communicators, mental world can influence the transformation of refusal strategies selected (2) People of different age groups adopt different refusal strategies. Adults use more indirect refusals,while children prefer to directly state their inner thoughts. In face of people with higher social power,refuser uses more indirect strategies, while more direct ones to those with lower social power. Under the influence of American low context culture and emphasis on individualism, American people prefer to directly convey their refusal intention. (3) Time and place of communicators can also influence the choice of refusal strategies.From the theoretical aspect, the research enriches theories on refusal speech act and also broadens application area of these theories. From the practical part,the research offers a lot of refusing techniques which can help realize the refusal intention and meanwhile minimize the threat to face to the least. This is good for protecting our own profits and also maintaining social relationship. Besides, it can lead to a deeper understanding to western culture and may offer some inspiration to cross-cultural communication and English teaching and learning.