| Refusal speech act, as one of the speech acts, widely and frequently occurs in our daily communication. Members of different cultures vary in the ways of refusing others due to different social etiquettes. In interpersonal communication, it is of great importance to properly say ―no‖. In the past decades, many scholars have carried out researches on refusal speech act from a linguistic perspective, while studies on this speech act, especially the empirical studies, from the intercultural perspective are still scarce.This thesis investigates refusal speech act performed by the Chinese and the American employees of a transnational company located in China from the perspective of intercultural face negotiation. By collecting real-life interlocutions concerning refusal through the Participant Observation Method, this thesis aims at discovering the similarities and differences in refusal strategies employed by the two cultural groups of employees. In order to confirm the research result, half-structured interviews are also conducted.The two studies show that both the Chinese and the American employees tend to use a combination of refusal strategies to mitigate face-threats brought about by the refusal speech act; giving reason/hint is a common strategy shared by both groups; and both the two groups of employees use more indirect refusal strategies in response to the request; It is observed from the findings that there is an obvious tendency of convergence of refusal behaviors between Chinese and American employees in transnational companies at the present time. However, some differences are noticeable. The likelihood of refusal by American employees is higher than that of their Chinese counterparts; they also differ in using the strategy of ―giving suggestion‖ and ―apologizing‖. The differences are attributed to the impact of Chinese traditional perception of power distance on the Chinese subjects, as well as that of the individualistic conception on the American subjects. |
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