A Comparative Study On Chinese Refusal Strategies Employed By University Students From Taiwan And Mainland China

This thesis is concerned with the performance of the speech act of refusals in Chinese. Though a large proportion of cross-cultural pragmatics researches have been focused on EFL learners’ speech act of refusal, studies on university students living in distant regions: Taiwan and Mainland China, while speaking the same native language are found to be rarely documented so far. Moreover, refusals reflect the Chinese social communication in accordance with "face", which is a choice to explore whether there are more differences or similarities between the people in Taiwan and those in mainland China in daily communication.Hence, this thesis aims to explore the following three research questions:(a) What are the preferred refusal strategies in Mandarin Chinese employed by the university students from Taiwan (shortened as TS) and students from Mainland China (shortened as MCS) in refusing suggestions, offers, requests, and invitations? (b) How indirect are the refusal strategies employed by the TS and the MCS when interacting with strangers, common classmates, close friends and family members? (c) What are the reasons that might cause those similarities and differences from the point view of cultural development?Accordingly, this research compares the refusal strategies employed by the TS and the MCS in refusals through implementing DCTs on the basis of the taxonomy of refusal strategies developed by Beebe et al. (1990). The DCT comprises 16 different situations that are classified into four stimulus types eliciting a refusal:four requests, four invitations, four offers and four suggestions. Additionally, all those descriptions of the DCTs and the responses made by the research subjects are written in simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. There are overall 20 research subjects taking part into the interviews for the pilot study and 80 research subjects participating in filling the DCTs for the major research.The research results show that (a) the most frequently used Chinese refusal strategies by the TS and the MCS are indirect refusals C (reason, excuse, explanation), indirect refusals A (statement of regret), indirect refusals D (statement of alternative), indirect refusals J (unspecific or indefinite reply), adjuncts to refusals and direct refusals; (b) the ranking of directness for both the TS and the MCS is: strangers> close friends> family members> common classmates; (c) there are some differences between the TS and the MCS in the content and the directness of the refusals due to the diverse historical developments. Findings from this research indicate much more similarities than differences among the TS and the MCS in making refusals, which in turn verify the previous studies of the indivisible relationship between Taiwan and Mainland China.