A Comparative Study Of Chinese Refusal Strategies In A Dream Of Red Mansions And The Story Of A Noble Family

Refusal speech act refers to the act that the speaker refuses to engage in an actionproposed by the interlocutor. It is essentially a face-threatening act because itcontradicts the expectations and thus, appropriate strategies need to be used tominimize the face-threatening force and at the same time, to express the refusalintention successfully.This thesis, based on speech act theory and politeness principle, conducts acomparative study of Chinese refusal strategies between two classic Chinese novels ofdifferent eras but with similar theme, characterization and artistic skills: A Dream ofRed Mansions and The Story of a Noble Family, trying to figure out in what ways arethe refusal strategies different in these two novels. At the same time, social factorssuch as relative power and social distance will also be analyzed to see how theseaffect the different use of strategies.The data are collected from the first eighty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansionsand the whole book of The Story of a Noble Family. All of these data are analyzedusing a statistical and inductive method based on the research questions.Language is not constant. It interacts with every aspects of our complicatedsociety. Therefore, the changes in society and the influence of other cultures and freshideas may in somewhat be reflected through the use of language. The result of thestudy shows that in both of the two novels, people are more inclined to use indirectrefusals to mitigate the face-threatening force. But there is a significant increase in theuse of direct strategies in The Story of a Noble Family. In terms of indirect refusalstrategies, the strategy of reason is most frequently used in both novels. Besides,compared with A Dream of Red Mansions, the strategy of dissuade interlocutors hasincreased, the strategy of alternative, dramatically decreased and avoidance, keeps thesame in The Story of a Noble Family and these three strategies all belong to thefrequent use of indirect refusal strategies. Besides, there is also a decrease in thestrategies of folk wisdom and principles.Moreover, in both novels, the most frequently used strategy of people of higherstatus is direct refusal, then comes the strategy of reason. And when the relative poweris equal, the most frequently used strategy is reason in A Dream of Red Mansions anddirect strategy in The Story of a Noble Family. Besides, social distance also has somerelationship with the strategy choice. Although people of kin favor the indirect strategy of reason most, in The Story of a Noble Family, more kinds of strategies areemployed and the frequency is relatively more even. And for people of non-kin, directrefusal is mostly used in The Story of a Noble Family and while in A Dream of RedMansions, it is the strategy of reason.