A Study Of Factors Influencing The Use Of English Refusal Strategies

The notion of “face” has to do with feelings of being embarrassed or humiliated. It issomething that is emotionally invested and something that can be lost, maintaine, or enhanced, and therefore must be constantly attended to in interpersonal interaction.For language learners, learning a foreign language not only means to master thegrammar, pronunciation, vocabulary of the target language, but also means to use thelanguage in a polite, accurate and effective way so as to minimize the misunderstandingsand embarrassment in cross-cultural communication.This study is undertaken to explore the factors that influence the English refusalspeech act with a particular focus on the speech act--Refusal. As one of the speech actsthat frequently occur in our daily communication, refusal is the ‘non-cooperative’ optionwhich is directed towards the interlocutor’s request, invitation, suggestion or offer. Eitherin China or in western countries, the speech act of refusal will inevitably threaten the faceof both the interlocutors more or less. This study is conducted mainly with the theoreticalframework of Brown&Levinson’s Face Theory. Face theory is based on the face notionthat is raised by Erving Goffman in the late1950s. Brown&Levinson provide acomprehensive theory based on the idea that politeness is the want of "face", and theypropose five politeness strategies for speakers to perform a "Face-Threatening Act"(FTA).In the American TV series Desperate Housewives, the four heroines live in thesuburban area in the US, and their way of speaking is very close to the real life, so theauthor conducts this research by using the corpus collected from this TV series.The aim of this research is to find out the factors influencing the refusal strategiesby native speakers of English. The research questions addressed in the study are asfollows: (1) How does age influence English refusal strategies?(2) How does social distance influence English refusal strategies?(3) How does social power influence English refusal strategies?Quantitative analysis method combined with qualitative analysis method will beapplied in the thesis to analyze the results of the research. The178situations of refusalspeech act collected are mainly divided into two categories: direct refusal and indirectrefusal. And the author analyses the application of these refusal speech acts from aspectsof age, social distance and social power. Three major findings are achieved in the presentstudy1) Different age groups of American people choose different kinds of refusalstrategies when they perform refusal speech act. When performing the refusal speech acts,the adults of American apply indirect refusal strategies at first. As for children, whosesocial skills are not completely mature, and they don’t know how to take care of thehearer’s face when they refuse other people, so direct refusal strategies is their first choice.2) When the American people perform refusal speech act, the relationship betweentheir social distance and the degree of politeness is not linear, but in the form of a "U".3) Social power does have some influence on the refusal strategies choosing amongAmerican people. When refusing a person whose social power is higher than the rejecter,the rejecter often uses an indirect refusal strategy; but when the rejectee’s social power islower than the rejecter, direct refusal strategies will be the rejecter’s first choice. When thetwo interlocutors’ social power is equal, the applications of direct or indirect refusalstrategies are paralleled on the whole.The findings of English refusal speech act in this thesis can not only let the Englishlearners have a better understanding of English refusal speech act, which is good for theintercultural communication, but can also provide a model for overseas students andEnglish translators.