A Contrastive Study On Refusal Strategies Between Chinese And English In Business Organizational Communication

This paper is a contrastive study of refusal strategies between English and Chinese in business organizational interaction, taking into account the refusal speech act theory and politeness theory.Based on a modified version of the discourse completion test (DCT) developed by Beebe et al. (1990), this paper makes a comparative study of the negative responses to 12 scenarios designed to elicit refusals for requests, invitations, suggestions, and offers from a higher, lower or equal status in Chinese and English, and probes into the heterogeneous orientation in the Occidental and Oriental cultures through the analysis of the language data. Significant differences were observed between the two groups of subjects in several strategies, mainly: excuse, apology, alternative, positive opinion, empathy, postponement, principle, and gratitude.The result of the analysis reveals that the Chinese and the native English speakers on the one hand share some similarities in their speech act of refusal, but on the other hand, they do distinguish from each other in terms of strategies and semantic formulas. In general, the native English speakers tend to employ more direct refusal strategy than the Chinese speakers. However, social status plays a more important role in refusals in Chinese culture norms.This study is of value in probing into the appropriateness of speech act of refusal in Chinese and English in business organizational interactions, which can help the people concerned to enhance the strategic use of this speech act and eventually enhance the chances of success and promote the communicative competence in this field.