Rejected Verbal Behavior And Policy Analysis

As refusal act happens frequently in the communication, and also it will threaten face, refusal act is important in daily life. Whether it is used correctly will influence the relationship between each other, and influence the ongoing of the communication. Some scholars have done some research on it, but most of the researches made comparison between Chinese refusal act and English refusal act, no systematical research has been done on the Chinese refusal act itself. My thesis tries to do research on Chinese refusal act, so as to help foreign students use Chinese refusal act better.According to both subjective and objective standards, refusal speech act may be divided into stress refusal, tactful refusal and direct refusal, indirect refuse respectively.Refusal speech act is performed by different refusal strategies, and different relationship between communicators influences the use of the strategies. The relationship may be classified into four kinds:strangers, common friends, closed friends, family members. My thesis made a survey about the four relationships refusing to request, invitation, suggestion, offer respectively, then summed up 13 refusal strategies, and different strategies has different frequencies in use.According to the survey, we find we don't use single refusal strategy, we always use more than two strategies at the same time, so the strategies always appear as a combination. For example, when refusing to a stranger's request, the typical combination of strategies is'sorry plus excuse'. When refusing to a common friend's request, the typical combination is'sorry plus reason'. When refusing to a good friend's request, the typical combination is also'sorry plus reason'. When refusing to your parent's request, the typical combination is'reason plus delay', or just reason.I hope my research can be a guide to the teaching to foreign students, making foreign students use Chinese refusal act better in communicating with Chinese people.