A Study Of Refusal Strategies Used In A Dream Of Red Mansions

This thesis focuses on the speech act of refusal which the writer defines as the refusing act to the speakers'directives. When speakers perform the speech act of refusal, various strategies will be employed. The reason for using those refusal strategies is that the speech act of refusal represents an inherent threat to face. Therefore, when speakers try to construct an efficient refusal, that is, to refuse others properly and efficiently, they will try to make the refusal as polite as possible so as to reduce the threatening effects to minimum. In order to be as polite as possible, the language used by the refuser may be indirect. This notion of"indirectness"is so inseparable to the most influential theoretical conceptualizations of politeness (Brown &Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983), that there is a tendency in the literature to reduce linguistic politeness theory to the simple formula"the more indirect, the more polite". From this point, there is a theoretical discussion that states a positive correlation between indirectness and politeness. Furthermore, the use of refusals is associated with the speakers'or the addressees'social distance and power relationships.The thesis is situated within certain Chinese culture, more specifically, the language of eighteenth century China. On the basis of the world famous Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (the first eighty chapters), the writer examines the nature of politeness in refusals used in eighteenth century Chinese. It is concluded that in eighteenth century Chinese there also exists a positive correlation between indirectness and politeness and speakers can both be direct and polite by using mitigating devices.