The Pragmatic Analysis Of Refusals Performed By Chinese College Students Based On Optimality Theory

By investigating and analyzing the pragmatic strategies in the speech act of refusals made by Chinese EFL students, the present study aims to learn their pragmatic ability. In the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory(OT), by analyzing the strategies used by students to judge the obedience and violation of the four maxims of cooperative principle, ranking orders of the constraints of the strategies are deduced.According to the object and purpose of the study, from the speech act of refusal involving requests, invitations, suggestions and offers, taking into consideration of the status and intimation of the requesters, a 15 questions questionnaire is designed. 100 effective questionnaires are collected and counted to give a detailed description of refusing strategies in different situations students in order to achieve the purpose of politeness and through quantitative analysis, the frequency of the use of various strategies is counted. After the questionnaire, the interview activity was conducted with students, so as to understand the students’ understanding of the questionnaire and the influence of the language ability to the pragmatic competence.In the perspective of refusal strategies, students incline to use indirect refusals to achieve politeness in spite of the status of the requesters. The strategies of statement of regret and reasons and explanations are most frequently used. In the perspective of OT, maxim of quantity is the most frequently violated, while manner is the least frequently violated. That is to say, quantity always ranks the lowest, while maxim of manner mostly ranks the highest. Maxim of relation and quality distributes in all the first three positions in the orders.Through the analysis above, we can conclude that students’ English language ability largely affect their pragmatic competence. The overemphasis and generalization of cultural differences will affect the pragmatic ability. Therefore, in the process of training students’ pragmatic competence, it is important to emphasize the pragmatic knowledge, compare the similarities and differences of the culture, and improve their oral English.