The Speech Act Of Indirect Refusal In Contemporary Chinese

Recently scholars have studied refusal from angles such as the speech act theory, and the politeness principle. Some even compared Chinese English learners and English native speakers'similarities and differences when performing refusal. However, few studies examined Chinese and foreign Chinese learners'performance of refusals. Accordingly, this article probed into Chinese and foreign Chinese learners'refusal strategies.The subjects include 55 university students of both Chinese native speakers of non-language majors and international students of Chinese majors. This study adopts Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz (1990)'s classified"semantic formulae"of refusal speech act and the frame of cross-cultural studies. The result of the analysis shows that the subjects of the two groups have similarities when performing refusal speech act, that is to say, they prefer the indirect strategies in most cases and adopts various remedial measures. However, the two groups display their respective characteristics. For example, although the indirect strategies are in common use in the two groups, there exist great differences in use frequency and preference. Chinese subjects'indirect strategies are much richer, the syntactic and lexical means that they turn to are more and the refusals are more direct than foreign students of Chinese. Although foreign students of Chinese are aware of the means of indirect refusal, their performance is unsatisfactory because of their poor pragmatic competence.This study is valuable to teaching Chinese to foreigners, to helping Chinese as target language learners improve their communicative skills, and to understanding Chinese culture at a deeper level. Besides, the study may also carry implications to English language teaching to the extent that Chinese students of English develop stronger cultural awareness when learning English, and know better about the similarities and differences of indirect refusal in both their native tongue and target language. All these may eventually contribute to successful cross-cultural communication.