A Study Of English Refusal Based On Politeness Theory

Refusal speech act is a frequently used speech act in daily communication. As a response to suggestions, offers, invitations and requests, it is regarded as a threat to face by nature. Enormous studies have been done on this topic, and however, there still leaves much room for further studies. Therefore, this thesis tries to fill the gap by making a thorough analysis of English refusal in terms of language forms and refusal strategies. The study also pays special attention to gender differences in performing refusal strategies.This thesis collects refusals from an American comedy,named Ugly Betty. First, it summarizes the characteristics of English refusals, in its language forms and refusal strategies. Next, the thesis discusses the contrastive gender analysis in refusals based on politeness theories. Then, in order to illustrate English refusals, the author takes the potential contextual factors into consideration. In the end, some implications for English teaching and learning are drawn from the study.Furthermore, politeness theories serve as theoretical framework to study English refusals. The politeness strategies are composed of bold on record, positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy and off record. Specifically speaking, every type of refusal strategy embodies the corresponding politeness strategy stated by Brown and Levinson(1987). In addition, analysis from Leech’s Politeness Principle(1983) is briefly done as well to strongly support the findings.Since politeness is a dynamic process changing with context, the influencing factors including physiological, psychological, social and cultural factors are discussed in chapter four so as to illustrate the analysis.With the help of quantitative and qualitative analysis, the thesis concludes some typical formulaic expressions in English refusals, altogether nine patterns. What’s more, it also proves that there are gender differences in employing refusal strategies. For example, women use more tokens than men. It is doubtless that some similarities are found as well. Meanwhile, it is consistent with the former researches, and for example, indirect ones are used more than direct ones.In the end, the thesis draws a conclusion concerning findings from the research, which is constructive for English learners to learn how to perform appropriate refusals, how to improve cross-cultural communication and cross-gender communication, how to avoid pragmatic failures and how to improve pragmatic competence. All in all, we should follow pragmatic theories to perform speech acts in order to maintain harmonious relationship and make the conversations go smoothly.