A Study On Refusal Structural Patterns In Chinese And English

"Refusal" refers to a kind of language expression that people on the other side of communication do not accept the speakers'recommendations, requests, help, etc.. Because refusals may threaten people's face, it needs to be uttered carefully by speakers. In order to reduce the threat to listeners' face and maximize the harmony of the communication, various expressions are often adopted. Some people use the negation of negative sentences in the form of expression. One can easily understand the literal meaning of the speaker, while other expressions have no obvious rejection mark. People tend to understand the meaning from the context.The thesis collected refusals from Chinese TV show program You Are the One, and English TV show program Take Me Out, The Bachelor ette. A small self-built corpus was developed to do the research.First, this thesis classified the "refusal" into three parts: initial language of refusal (denoted A), central language of refusal (denoted B) and auxiliary language of refusal (denoted C). The thesis summarized five structural patterns, B, B+C/C+B/C+B+C, A+B,A+B+C/A+C+B/A+C+B+C and C/A+C. The frequency of using these five patterns in Chinese and English was counted. Then, with the theory of discourse markers, this paper analyzed the three parts of Chinese and English refusal utterances respectively, sumed up the main expressions and explains the reason why the common words can express refusing meaning in specific contexts according to the context theory and system-functional theory. This thesis applied both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the similarities and differences between Chinese and English refusals.Both Chinese and English shared five structural patterns of refusals.They used "B+C/C+B/C+B+C" the most, "C/A+C" the least. The frequency varied in sub-classes. Chinese used more initial language and auxiliary language. For central language of refusal, Chinese used more expressions without negative tag. In English refusals, abundant word forms are used after negative tags. And the negative markers of English are more abundant than Chinese. Besides "no" "not",there are "never""dislike" "hardly" "wrong" "instead" "last" and so on.The conclusion of this thesis can enrich the existing researches on the refusals. It can be used to guide Chinese and English learners to grasp the structure of refusals quickly and correctly. It can contribute to the corpus information retrieval and computational linguistics and large data retrieval.In the conclusion part of this thesis, it summarized the main achievements we have got, pointed out the shortcomings and the future research drection.