A Study Of Business Refusal Speech Act

Speech act theory is a very important theory in pragmatics research.Many scholars have also studied refusal speech acts,but most of the researches are about a single language or a comparative study among several languages.It also analyzes the refusal discourse in literary works,which comes from daily conversations.Refusal itself is a kind of face threat behavior,and politeness is a strategy to reduce face threat in verbal communication,which is influenced by the three interpersonal variables such as social distance,power,and the imposition level of face threat behavior in culture.This research makes a new understanding of the third variable in interpersonal variables and points out that in a particular context,the speaker's speech act is restricted by specific factors including some conventional factors such as gender,age,cultural values,and some changing factors such like role changes,specific context factors,and so on.The research data are chosen from Professional Business domain in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English as the target corpus,which is the first large-scale corpus of English as a Lingual Franca nowadays and also the largest spoken English corpus in the world founded by Barbara Seidlhofer,a professor of English and applied linguistics at the University of Vienna,Austria.The Professional Business domain of the Vienna-Oxford International English Corpus is chosen as the target corpus,involved a total of 23 speech events such as conversations,meetings,questionnaires,and services,152 speakers,and 203,421 words in total.According to the data collected,this research aims to try to find out the business refusal features under the influencing of interpersonal variables such like social distance,social power and other conventional factors(gender,age,culture values,etc.)and dynamic factors(roles,contexts).According to the Vienna-Oxford International English Corpus,this research analyzes the business refusal speech acts from the perspective of interpersonal variables.The study finds that the greater the social distance is,the more the speakerprefers to take the direct refusal strategy.In terms of power,it is in a positive correlation.The greater the power,the more direct refusal strategies take;conversely,the smaller the power,the more indirect refusal strategies take.In some conventional factors,gender and age are not major factors in business speech act,while cultural difference plays a significant factor.It is the culture values that mainly affect the refusal strategies' choices.People who come from a high context culture prefer to take indirect refusal strategies,while those who come from a low context culture prefer to take direct refusal strategies.In addition,there is also a discovery that in the business speech act,when it comes to interest,the factor rises to the dominant factor,and the speaker is straightforward,and often takes a direct refusal strategy but it does not influence the relationship within colleagues and companies.This is a new analysis on business refusal speech act from the perspective of interpersonal variables which is meaningful to the study of business pragmatics.On other side,this study makes a guidance for people both in business affairs and daily life.