A Case Study Of English-speaking Children And Chinese-speaking Children's Refusals

Refusal is a speech act to perform the refusing. Studies on refusals began in the late 1970s, but they have never been a heated topic in language studies. Children's refusals are even less concerned. With methods such as observation methods, literature data methods and statistical methods, this thesis offers a case study on the refusals produced by the four subjects, ZHZ, MHR, Adam and Sarah, aiming at examining children's pragmatic development in refusals and the differences and the similarities of that between Chinese-speaking children and English-speaking children.This study includes three parts. The first part is the literature review on previous studies on both adults'and children's refusals from the following four angles: the definitions of refusal, the refusal strategies and related variables, the cross-linguistic contrastive studies and the pragmatic studies on refusal.The second part conducts a longitudinal study on the pragmatic development of the two Chinese-speaking children's use of refusals. The result shows that children sometimes will use rude expression to deliver refusal, which has never been mentioned in previous studies. Most of the strategy types had emerged before the children are 18 months old. As the children grow older, they tend to use more types of refusal strategies, more indirect refusals, especially more reason, and more compound refusals. They also tend to use more words to refuse as they grow older. The adults'subsequent responses are also investigated in this part. Adults'responses are compared with children's refusals and with the help of bivariate correlations analysis, significant correlation between adults'adjusting and children's alternative and that between adults'giving and asking reason and children's reason have been determined.The third part focuses on a cross-linguistic contrastive analysis of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children's refusal strategies. After comparing the refusals produced by the four subjects, some similarities have been found between them. First, the same refusal strategies have been identified in their responses except that MHR and Adam did not use rude expressions. Second, in the investigated period all of them used simple negation, reason and alternative most frequently. They all used more types of refusal strategies as they grew older. Third, their refusals became longer as they grew older. Some differences between the Chinese-speaking children and English-speaking children are also detected. The two English-speaking children used more reason and insistence but fewer partial acceptance than the two Chinese-speaking children. The contrastive study on the correlations between adults'subsequent responses and the children's refusals reveals some differences between them.