A Comparison Of Refusal Strategies Between Chinese And English Speech Act

Speech acts are the important field in pragmatics. Studies in the field are beneficial not only to the understanding of language function and nature, but also to the study of language thoughts. Politeness is the norm that people of different cultural backgrounds must obey and uphold, but different cultures have different constraints on politeness strategies employed by people in communication. The theoretical background of the research is the politeness theories of Brown & Levinson and Gu Yueguo, etc. The methodological framework is based on a modified version of the discourse completion test (DCT) developed by Beebe et al.(1990). The DCT consists of 11 situations designed to elicit refusals for requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. Each of the situations in this questionnaire is describing different topics, each topic takes place in a specified context of situation. The data were collected from 52 college students, including 28 Chinese college students and 24 American college students who were asked to fill in the information exactly according to the actual happening and write down the responses or apply other refusal strategies in their own native language in real life.The author has a comparative analysis of English and Chinese direct and indirect refusal strategies from the point of frequency of all refusal strategies according to the statistical result of the questionnaire, taking into consideration the social status of the interlocutors, and analyzing the similarities and differences of refusal strategies between English and Chinese.From the analysis of the refusals given by Chinese and American subjects, the results indicate that (1) There are many similarities and differences between Chinese and English refusal strategies. (2) Social status plays an important role in refusals used by Chinese and English. The results also indicate that the politeness strategies are determined by the traditional thought patterns and interpersonal relationships. At last the author displays some existing problems in current English teaching in Chinaand puts forward some proposals on the improvement of China's English teaching, of cultivating students' pragmatic awareness and communicative competence, of noticing the appropriate politeness principles when communicating with foreigners. Finally the author draws the conclusion and describes the paper's limitations on the present research.