A Contrastive Study On Chinese And American Refusal Strategies

Due to the differences in languages and cultures, Chinese and Americans people show diversities as well as similarities in refusal strategies even in the same situation. The refusee will be lost or even be infuriated, if such discrepancies are not taken into account, in the case of which misunderstanding may occur and the relationship between the interlocutors may not be well maintained. Previous scholars have done a limited number of researches and experiments on the speech act of refusal, as compared to the studies on the speech act of request. Even fewer studies on refusal strategies are conducted from a contrastive angle between Chinese and Americans.This study intends to make a contrastive description of the similarities and differences of Chinese and American refusal strategies on the basis of a DCT, discourse completion test survey, among Chinese and American subjects.Two groups of subjects take part in our experiment, with a total number of 324. 68 males and 94 female belong to the American group while 72 males and 90 females fall into the Chinese group. Our questionnaire is designed under the guideline of DCT, incorporating 12 situations and 24 scenarios.Common sense tells us that when the distance of two people is small enough, the act of refusal between them tends to be more direct. For example, people with intimate relationships, such as husband and wife, or friends who have known each other very well, are more likely to use fewer strategies and be more direct. In addition, the refuser may use some intimate body language to cover up possible damage to the refusee, if any, in the case of which the interlocutors focus more on the communication itself. In other words the"face"issue is not the first concern in this case, or at least not an important concern, which is out of the range of our discussion in this research.For the convenience of our discussion, it is particularly pointed out in our survey that the relationships between colleagues, classmates, friends and relatives are merely ordinary ones. People in these relationships are not intimate at all. All the data are processed by SPSS, after which come the conclusions shown as follows. There are similarities for both Chinese and Americans when it comes to refusal strategies. Both groups tend to apply indirect refusal strategy and be most likely to employ strategy 19, namely expressing regrets or saying sorry.Meanwhile our study also finds out the following differences between these two groups.1. There is a significant difference in the use of various strategies between the male NCs and the male NEs.2. There is a significant difference in the use of various strategies between the female NCs and the female NEs.3. There is a significant difference in the use of 30 different strategies under various situations between the NCs and the NEs.4. Since there is a significant difference between all the NCs and the NEs in the use of those 30 strategies summarized in this paper, it is also true with the male and the female subjects in these two different groups.More detailed diversities are presented from the following aspects.1. The NEs use direct refusal far more frequently than the NCs.2. When it comes to strategy 20, making excuses, the NEs are more concerned with personal feelings or interest, while the NCs attach more importance to the feeling of the refusee or the third party rather than the refuser himself/herself.3. The NEs use strategy 30 more often than the NCs, which means the NEs focus more on principles when they carry out the speech act of refusal.4. The variable of social status exerts a greater impact on the choice of refusal strategies for the NCs than for the NEs. For the NCs, the higher the social status of the rufusee, the more strategies they would like to employ, as a result of which the more scores go to all the strategies and the refusal act seems undoubtedly more polite.5. Under the conditions set in this study, our experiment data suggest that, with the variable of power held constant, the bigger the social distance becomes, the fewer strategies the refuser tends to employ, meaning the less effort they will take. However, the NEs and the NCs have some disagreement on the order of social distance when it comes to different relationships. In the case of the NCs, the order is stranger>colleagues (classmates)>friends>relatives, while for the NEs, the order turns into something like stranger>colleagues (classmates)>relatives>friends.6. Owing to the nature of different languages, some strategies are missing in either English or Chinese.The theoretical framework of this paper covers the speech act theory, polite theory and relevance theory, among which speech act theory serve as the fundamental base while politeness theory and relevance theory provide theoretical guide to this study.This study makes use of relevance theory in explaining how people apply relevance in the scenario of refusal. Perceived from the angle of relevance theory, the concept of refusal can be interpreted as a choice in a dynamic context in response to a request, an invitation, a suggestion and an offer in an interactive communication process. The whole process of applying certain kind of refusal strategy can be seen as an optimal relevance choice from a set of assumptions of context, for the purpose of the successful communication of achieving the interactors'communicative aims. The varieties of refusal strategies come from different choices among different groups. The reason why a refuser chooses one strategy over another is because s/he needs to create the optimal relevance, which to great extend depends on different cultural background and the various effect of social status, social distance and gender under different cultures. Politeness coincides with relevance theory on this point, which jointly illustrates the differences and similarities of refusal strategies between Chinese people and American people.The main contributions of this study are summarized as follows.1. This study does not simply focus on the single aspect of Chinese or American refusal strategies. On the contrary, this study goes farther than that and gives a thorough and deeper insight into the issue of refusal strategy from the perspective of contrastive study.2. Something unique can be found in the methodology. We attempt to exam the phenomena of refusal by means of quantitive analysis on the basis of 30 refusal strategies summed up in this study. Particular data analyses are attached to the order of the choice among these 30 strategies as well as the specific application of each strategy.3. In terms of theoretical framework, the study is done under the framework of politeness, but we are not confined to it and we have a new discovery. As is known to all, B & L's formula is in accordance with the FTA of request, which means the bigger the numerical value of Wx, the more threat the act poses to the hearer's fact, therefore, the more efforts the speaker needs to take in accomplishing the FTA. Also, the bigger the social distance (D) between the requester and the requestee, the bigger value the Wx obtains, meaning more efforts will be taken to do a request. In one word, the formula of Wx=D (S,H) + P(H,S) + Rx works perfectly well in the case of request.However our data indicates it is not the case when the formula is applied to the speech act of refusal. Excluding the situation where the refuser and the refusee have intimate relationship and under the condition that there exist only ordinary relationships between the refuser and the refusee, our research finds out that the bigger the social distance between the interlocutors, the less effort the refuser will make. In other words, the bigger the variable of D, the smaller the outcome of Wx. A case in point is that, in our survey, the refuser did not spend much effort to refuse a stranger's offer for a cup of tea while it they had to employ some strategies to try to refuse a former colleague in the same situation. (For more elaboration and more data support, refer to 5.5.2 (4))4. We attempt to apply the relevance theory to the study of refusal, which is a brand new angle.5. This study is a combination of theoretical and experimental analysis. It tries to provide a thorough and complete view of examination to the speech act of refusal.In the end it is worth pointing out that the study is believed to bear theoretical and practical significance for language teaching, translation and cross-cultural communication as well. Meanwhile this study gives us a better understanding of politeness theory and hopefully enriches the theory in a certain way which in turn helps to reduce pragmatic failure in cross-culture communication and further offers a new inspiration to language teaching and cross-cultural communication etc. In addition, this dissertation studies the refusal strategies from the perspective of relevance theory, which is new and illuminating.