A Research On Refusal Between Chinese And English In Occupational Communication

"Refusal" which is a kind of speech act, arising in daily communication, occupational interaction, business or political negotiation, needs to be uttered carefully by speakers and interpreted alertly by listeners. Because of the differences in languages and cultures, Chinese native speakers and English native speakers show diversities in applying refusal strategies as well as interpreting them. The previous scholars have done a limited number of refusal studies from perspectives of pragmatics, cross-culture communication and second language acquisition. Most of them, however, with the problems of simply listing language examples, describing them and sorting out some insufficient data, are short of explanatory researches, a good system for strategy classification and a generalizable summary. Conducted from a contrastive angle between Chinese and English and based on sampling data, the present study, applying multiple theories, intends to discuss and compare the two parties’ refusal interpreting pattern, the similarities and differences of refusal strategies, the choices of transitivity system and the cultural diversity.After the first two chapters which present the theoretical background, the aims of this study, the orientation of it, and the layout of it, the third chapter explains the methodology of this study. The data-collection&sampling is one of the unique features of this study. The previous researches always adopt the discourse completion test, known as DCT alone to collect data. This study, however, attempts to do some modification of the DCT as well as many manageable experiment procedures, such as scenario investigation, pilot testing, interview and proportionate sampling, in order to guarantee the authenticity of the date collected. Besides, the other group of data, obtained from TV dramas, is transcribed into texts. Processed by proportionate sampling to avoid the random errors, the second group of data is also utilized to cover the shortage of the DCT.Then, in order to provide a multi-angle platform to analyze the speech act of refusal in Chinese and English occupational interaction respectively and comparatively, this study gives a thorough and deeper insight into the following four perspectives:the interpretation of refusal, the speech act of refusal, the grammar of refusal and the cultural factors of refusal.The first perspective is the "interpretation of refusal". The relevance theory makes revolutionary contributions to inferential studies. The concept of "ostensive-inferential" exhibits great advancement through expounding various indirect speech acts. The expectation of relevance which will be either satisfied or abandoned is produced for the sake of the interpretation of refusal speech act. The data in this study is classified into three broad categories in light of the meaning distinction in relevance theory which is the key leading to the comprehension on refusals. The purpose of this classification and statistical research is to describe and compare the generating mechanism, the understanding mechanism and the cognitive process between Chinese speakers and English speakers when they say "No" in occupational interaction. The refusal, in this study, can be seen as a choice in a dynamic context in response to a request, an invitation, an offer and a suggestion in an occupational interactive communication process. The whole process which applies a variety of refusal strategies can be regarded as an optimal relevance choice from a series of assumptions of context.The second perspective is the "speech act of refusal". It makes use of speech act theory and indirect speech act in explaining how people apply pragmatic strategies in the scenarios of refusals. This study innovatively classifies the refusal strategies into two groups:strategies in content and strategies in form. At the meantime, it gives the clear definitions of the classification standard. Then, the46refusal strategies are fallen into those two categories with20in content and26in form. The contrastive descriptions of the similarities and differences of Chinese and English refusal strategies are followed. Under the conditions set in this study, our experiment data, with the variable of power held constant, shows a very diverse tendency between Chinese and English.The third perspective which is called "the grammar of refusal" is based on the functional grammar approach. The data analysis is done under the theoretical guide of ideational function. It hopes to make a probe into the transitivity system by marking the transitivity processes in scenarios of refusals and doing statistic analysis after which come the measurable conclusions. The preference of choices from six types of transitivity processes in Chinese and English respectively and the regular pattern of the data changed with the variable of power held constant are fully discussed. Systemic functional linguistics is proved by some researchers to be supportive to Pragmatics in many ways. They both share the similarities like emphasizing the importance of function, the context and the discourse itself. This study attempts to testify this presumption by using both the pragmatics framework and a part of functional grammar theory to analyze the same two group subjects. This study is a combination of theoretical and experimental analysis which leads to the conclusion summarized as:the choice of transitivity processes works in cooperation with the generating of pragmatic strategies; the speaker’s choice of transitivity processes automatically generates the existence of pragmatic strategies.The last but not the least, the fourth perspective is "the cultural factors of refusal". Adopting the cross-cultural pragmatics approach is to study how people from different cultural backgrounds say "No" in the occupational interactive communication and to give the explanations based on the intercultural factors. The pragmatic environment, the pragmatic strategies and the pragmatic subject are three key aspects discussed to explicate the reasons why there are differences between Chinese and English in speech act of refusals. The pragmatic environment, including traditional culture, moral values, thinking mode, is a kind of invisible context in culture. It does not appear to catch, but it dominates the speech act in a strong way. The pragmatic strategies in address, compliment, politeness and patterns can provide the most direct explanation to the different refusal strategies between two languages. As for the pragmatic subject, it is in the core position in communication. So it is closely connected with other factors and is of decisive importance in strategy selection.In the conclusion part of this study, it summarizes the full text. Then it points out the main achievements we have got here as well as the innovation of this study. With the shortcomings discussed, the further research topics are given to be a research reminder.