A Study Of English Refusal Speech Act

Refusal is one of the speech acts that frequently occur in daily communication. It is the "non-cooperative" option which is directed towards the interlocutors'request, invitation, suggestion or offer. And refusal is also defined by many scholars as the "dispreferred second or dispreferred" second part in conversation. Brown and Levinson classify the speech act of refusal into the category of obvious "face-threatening acts" (FTA). So whether it is used properly will influence the relationship between the interlocutors, and influence the smooth going of the communication. This thesis tries to do systematic research on English refusal speech act. The author expounds thoroughly on the characteristics, categorizations and influencing factors of the refusal speech act. The influencing factors are context-based. Along with the change of the context, different refusal strategies will be employed. In terms of pragmatic principle, the author selects Suo Zhenyu's tact principle. Under the guidance of the tact principle, direct and indirect refusal strategies are summarized. According to the tact principle and refusal communication strategies, the author analyses and generalizes the corpus collected from the interviews and TV series. This research can play a guiding role in cross-cultural communication and English teaching, making the students refuse requests, invitations, suggestions and offers in a more authentic way, so as to achieve smooth communication. The author hopes the research can have certain reference value to the scholars who will carry out further studies in the speech act of refusal.