Study On Indirect Refusal Based On The Adaptation Theory

This is a theoretical study on indirect refusal. Indirect refusal is a dispreferred second part of an adjacency pair in daily communication, since it is a face-threatening act. Many linguists and scholars abroad and at home paid much attention to the study of it from perspectives of pragmatics, second language acquisition, sociolinguistic, cognitive linguistic, etc. But few studies from cognitive pragmatic perspective can give us a systematic analysis from the literature we obtained, which leaves us the space to do this study. This study,utilizing the Adaptation Model for Indirect Refusals (AMIR) based on the newly developed and famous pragmatic theory--Adaptation Theory, analyzes the communicative process of indirect refusals in English in the hope of understanding and explaining indirect refusal as the dynamic and complicated process in which the respondent adapts to correlates of the specific context and makes conscious linguistic choices to satisfy his two basic communicative goals (not complying with the initiation proposed by the initiator and maintaining face or saving face lost of the speaker which is caused by not complying with the initiator in order to keep a harmonious relationship). The process starts with the communicative goals and ends with the linguistic choice of indirect refusal as the realization or approaching to the communicative goals. The main part of this dynamic process is the adapting to context which is interadaptable with linguistic choices. It is just because of the interadaptability between the linguistic choices and context that context is generated and dynamic.Through this study, we find that the adaptation theory is a powerful theory in pragmatics, and it can explain many pragmatic phenomena from cognitive, social and cultural perspectives from their uses in form of speech acts. The adaptation model built in this study is scientific and operable. For indirect refusal makers, sometimes, they can not meet or approach both of their communicative goals at the same time. When this happens, they will normally give up the interactional goal, just as in Example two and Example three, and turn to use direct refusals to obtain their actional goals in order to be efficient. By comparing and analyzing the examples we collected, we find that, for the indirect refusal maker, it is generally easy to obtain his or her communicative goals by adapting to the factors of the initiator's three worlds rather than those of the respondent's. We also find that the risk of indirect refusals, in fact, comes from the property of negotiability of language itself which makes the meanings of indirect refusals indeterminate, and leaves the initiator chances to renegotiate. In practice, this study is of help in distinguishing the communicative goals of one's indirect speech act or the speaker's meaning from the surface forms of language. It can also guide us to successful use of indirect refusals in our daily communications. It can improve students'listening comprehension and hence improve their listening achievements.