Study On The Politeness Of Sincere And Ostensible Refusals In Chinese

Refusals are frequently performed in our daily lives, and the speech act of refusals is onesignificant research topic in Pragmatics. With the development of Pragmatics in recent years,the studies concerning speech acts have made considerable headway. Many scholars havemade systematic researches on the speech acts of greeting, complimenting, requestingapologizing, refusing and so on. However the major studies of refusal speech acts focus on thesincere refusals and there is relative paucity of research on ostensible refusals.Based on the speech act theory of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), with the theoreticalframe of the politeness theory put forward by Brown and Levinson, this thesis attempts tostudy how the Chinese perform the speech acts of sincere and ostensible refusals. Chinesesincere refusals are considered as face-threatening acts, which call for politeness strategies tominimize the negative effects on the addressee(s). In contrast, the ostensible refusals inChinese are frequently uttered to serve the politeness function in communication. Thesolidarity and relative power variables can influence the frequency of various strategiesadopted to make sincere or ostensible refusals. The relatively lower frequency occurs onChinese sincere refusals to the addressee with more distant relation but on ostensible refusalsto the addressee with the intimate relation. Ostensible refusals are always involved in a longnegotiating process with the vague excuses or the explanation concerning the negative orpositive face of the addressee(s). The suitable strategies of sincere refusals can strengthen theunderstanding and preserve the wants of the addresser. With the proper use of ostensiblerefusals, the Chinese can show the good manners and foster harmonious interpersonalrelations in communication.The thesis falls into eight parts.The first part is a general introduction. It introduces the definition of refusal speech act,the major content and the significance of this study.The second part reviews and makes comments on the previous studies on refusals. Basedon the literature review, we conclude that there has been a relative paucity of research on theinsincere refusals and it lacks the systematic study on ostensible refusals in Chinese.The third part serves as the theoretical framework of the whole thesis. Refusals are onecategory of speech acts, the theory could be traced back to the speech act theory of Austin(1962) and Searle (1969, 1979). And also the intrinsic characteristics of sincere refusals areface-threatening, Brown and Levinson (1987) theorize politeness as the strategy to mitigatethreats to face in verbal interaction. Positive Politeness Strategy and Negative PolitenessStrategy are two main redressing strategies.The fourth part presents the research method and data collection method. The researchmethod for this study is descriptive research, which shares characteristics with bothqualitative and experimental research designs. And the data in this paper are collected by threemethods---participant observation, discourse completion test and role-play.The fifth part focuses on the nature and the politeness strategies of Chinese sincererefusals. The instinct need of sincere refusals for politeness strategies and the variouscategories of strategies are expounded in this part.The sixth part introduces the defining features of ostensible refusals and the strategiesadopted to perform the politeness function.The seventh part makes the comparison on the structure, sequence, distributionfrequency of various strategies and the effects of social variables on adopting these strategiesto perform sincere and ostensible refusals in Chinese.The eighth part is a concluding part in which a summary is provided to sum up thefindings and limitations of this thesis.