A Study Of Refusal Speech Act Under Prototype Theory

Prototype Theory is a model of categorization proposed by American psychologist Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s.It has a profound influence upon every field of languages.Differing entirely from the traditional category theory,it insists that the cognitive reference-point of all things is the center of a category,while other members are extended from it.They are all constructed by family resemblances."Refusal speech act" as one of the most important performative speech acts in pragmatics has its own similarities and attributers and shows its own prototypical structure.Refusal is a kind of speech act that adopted by any class or any group of people to denies to engage in the actions such as invitation, request,offer and suggestion.This thesis will make an analysis of the category of refusal speech act through a study of Chinese native speakers.This tentative study adopts two questionnaires,a Discourse Completion Test(DCT) and a Goodness-of-example Ratings shortening(GOE),and the popular used coding scheme proposed by Beebe et al(1990).The subjects of the study are confined to two groups of students from Beijing Forestry University,China.The analysis of the data will take into account the frequency of refusal strategies or semantic formula,and attempt to find out the correlation between the Prototype Theory and the refusal strategies.The aim of the thesis is to explain the refusal strategies of refusal speech acts from the point of view of prototypical categorization and reaches the conclusion that they form a prototypical category with fuzzy boundaries and that its members differ in prototypical status.