A Contrastive Study Of Refusals In Chinese, American English And Japanese From A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Refusals are face-threatening acts in nature. Native speakers in every culture areendowed the ability to refuse properly. However, the way and strategies of refusalsvary from culture to culture. Thus, how to refuse politely becomes a huge challengefor second language learners.The thesis is theoretically based on Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Brown&Levinson’s Face Theory to discuss refusal speech acts according to Leech’s PolitenessPrinciple, Gu Yueguo’s Politeness Principle and related Japanese Politeness Conceptsand Politeness Theory. It aims to make a contrastive study of REFUSALS in Chinese,American and Japanese culture to find out similarities and differences in the use ofrefusal strategies. Furthermore, it also concerns how social status and distance affectpeople’s refusal strategies in three different cultures from a cross-cultural perspective.The research used the data collected from Discourse Completion Test (DCT).30Chinese native speakers,30American native speakers and30Japanese nativespeakers are all carefully chosen considering every aspect, such as language transfer,gender and education background. The DCT is designed to involve four situationswhere requests, invitations, offers and suggestions are supposed to be performed.Variables affecting refusals include social status and distance. The DCT is written inthree versions of Chinese, English and Japanese.The collected data are analyzed based on the Beebe et al.(1990)’s categorizationof refusal strategies. The research compared the refusal strategies used by theparticipants of the three groups and in addition, it observes how social status anddistance affects refusers’ behavior within each group to show how social elementsaffect native speakers differently.The results show that both similarities and differences are obviously manifestedin three languages. All three groups incline to use more indirect strategies than directstrategies. Moreover, degree may vary according to the culture, we could infer fromthe research that different situation, relative social status and distance in all societyaffect the refusers’ choice of refusal strategies. Every group tends to use more thanone strategy when they have to refuse. The similarities reveal that participants sharesimilar understandings of politeness in some aspects cross languages.On the contrary, the differences are mainly caused by the different cultural backgrounds and social factors. We could conclude differences mainly from threeaspects, utilization of direct and indirect strategies, total amount of strategies used andthe effects of social factors. Firstly, NJs ranks the highest percentage of the utilizationof direct strategies, especially the strategy of inability. This phenomenon is caused bythe Japanese language itself. NAs ranks the second. NCs are the most euphemisticgroup among the three. Secondly, NJs used more strategies to refuse, especially whenthey are refusing the people with higher social status. NCs are more economical asthey used fewer strategies to refuse. Thirdly, NJs are most sensitive to theinterlocutors’ social status than other groups. NCs rank the second. NAs’ refusalstrategies are seldom affected by social status.