| As an essential part of interpersonal interaction, politeness theories have always been a major concern for pragmatics. In the past century, the western pragmatics experts and scholars conducted enormous research and laid a solid foundation for the research on politeness phenomenon, among which the most well-known is the face theory formulated by Brown and Levinson and the Politeness Principle proposed by Leech. Following these researches a few Chinese scholars carried out extensive research on politeness phenomenon as well, among whom Gu Yueguo deserves our special attention. He proposed the Four Norms to account for the unique characteristics of Chinese politeness.Politeness can be expressed verbally and non-verbally, but in this study, only linguistic politeness is discussed; that is, the ways people express politeness verbally through refusal speech acts. Since Goffman's (1967) work, politeness has become one of the most active areas of research in language use.As a Face-Threatening-Act, refusal is frequently employed in our daily life. Due to its face-threatening nature, interlocutors have to take politeness into consideration and use some politeness strategies to mitigate its threat to the refusee's face.This thesis is to examine cross-cultural politeness phenomena reflected in refusal strategies in American English and Chinese in terms of similarities and dissimilarities and to seek explanations in virtue of related politeness theories and cultural values. Politeness appears to be a prevalent concept in human interactions, and to date studies pertaining to this have appeared in the literature from various perspectives. The present paper follows the trend of politeness study. Its novel point is to study politeness in connection with refusal strategies, i.e., to explore politeness through a contrastive study of refusal speech acts in American English and Chinese. Data were collected from a DCT that comprised of responses to five scenarios of three types (higher status, lower status and equal status) designed for Chinese and American college students. They were required to fill in their responses when refusing and then their respective refusal strategies were derived and analyzed. As the speech act of refusal is rather complicated, with offers, invitations, requests and suggestions involved, the researcher chose one of them, that is, refusal to requests as focus.In this study, the similarities and differences between the two groups are investigated from three levels: (1) direct and indirect refusal patterns used by the two groups; (2) the order and frequency of semantic formulas used in each situation were coded to investigate the strategies employed by the two groups; (3) influence of social status and social distance on the adoption of semantic formulas. Data proved that despite similarities, there were significant differences in strategies use between the two groups. The two groups seemed to have a preference for indirect strategies in most cases in the speech act of refusal. Nevertheless, in contrast to the NEs, the NCs made more efforts to avoid employing direct refusals and showed more sensitivity to the relative status of their interlocutors by using politeness markers and providing more or less specific reasons. In addition, cultural difference is evident in their preference for certain semantic formulas and the content conveyed. For instance, the NCS demonstrated more favor than the NEs for certain strategies such as postponement and offering alternatives while the NEs exhibited preference for principle, wish and statement of positive opinions.Different cultures have different perceptions and interpretations of appropriateness and politeness, and the analysis of face-saving strategies will undoubtedly shed light on the underlying sociolinguistic values of different culture. The ways that politeness is manifested reflect the modest nature of the Oriental peoples and the non-self-denigrative nature of the Westerners, which in turn are respective reflections of collective- and individual-oriented cultural values.So the significance of the present study lies in the fact that it goes further to the depth of seeking reasons for the differences in adopting refusal strategies from the perspective of different sociocultural values. Differences on politeness phenomena reflected in refusal strategies are ascribed to cultural values, thus proposing a trinity of refusal strategies, politeness and cultural values, which is an innovative attempt of the present study. |
