A Comparative Study Of Sino-american Refusal Realization Patterns From A Cross-cultural Perspective

Refusal speech act is a subcategory of speech act theory.A large amount of researches about refusal speech act have been done at home and abroad,but most of them focus on direct or indirect strategies,rather than refusal modifications,especially the comparison of refusal modifications between different languages.Differing from previous studies in which the data was mainly collected by questionnaires with the help of the method ?discourse completion test?,the author in the current thesis respectively collected 300 clips of refusal speech act from the Chinese and American TV series.Based on Beebe's classification of refusal strategies and Wang's classification of refusal modifications,the author classified and calculated the frequency of the data,and then analyzed Chinese and American English refusal realization patterns.Combining the quantitative method with qualitative method,this thesis explored to analyze the Chinese and American refusal strategies and modifications,as well as their similarities and differences..The results show that: when performing the refusal speech act,both Chinese and American people prefer indirect refusal strategies,due to the universality of politeness.However,influenced by individualism and collectivism,the indirect refusal strategies adopted by Chinese people outnumber those that are used by American people.The result of Chi-Square indicates that there exist significant differences in the choices of refusal strategies between Chinese and Americans,and the dimension of individualism and collectivism is related with refusal strategies choices used by Chinese and American people.With regard to the indirect refusal strategies,the most frequently adopted indirect strategies by both Chinese and Americans are statements of reason,excuse,and explanation.Chinese people seldom adopt the refusal strategy of ?wish? and American people rarely use refusal strategy of ?statement of alternative?.As for refusal modifications,the most frequently used refusal modification in Chinese and American data is vocabulary.Compared with American people,Chinese people always use ?address terms? and a large number of syntactic structures,while American people adopt more types of syntactic structures.The research not only enriches the cross-cultural studies,but also provides a new perspective for the research of refusal speech act.For English learners,this thesis contributes to reducing frication and barriers in cross-cultural communication,and reminding them to pay attention to the accumulation of western cultures.