A Contrastive Analysis Of The Speech Acts Of Refuting In China And America From An Intercultural Perspective

The studies of speech acts have been the focus of intercultural pragmatics for a long time,and the speech act is also a basic tool for studying communicative competences.What’s more,the speech act theory is proposed by Austin and Searle makes further exploration about this theory.In recent years,domestic and foreign scholars have conducted a lot of comparative studies on speech acts,such as complaints,rejections and thanks,but there are few studies on refuting and the comparisons of refuting speech acts between China and America.Foreign researches on refuting are mostly related to argumentations,but rarely involve specific explorations of refuting languages in daily life.What’s more,the studies of domestic researches mainly focus on the specific explorations of a single language based.on politeness strategies,such as classroom refuting,online refuting,conference refuting discussions,and spoken Chinese refutation discourses,etc.But both foreign and domestic researches rarely compare the impacts of different cultural dimensions on the implementations of refuting speech acts from an intercultural perspective.Therefore,this thesis uses 300 refuting speech acts collected from Chinese and American life-related TV series as the research corpus and all the refuting speech acts data are selected based on the appropriate conditions of speech acts proposed by Searle.Firstly,this thesis sums up the similarities and differences in strategies and specific ways of refuting speech acts by statistical analysis;secondly,according to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory,power distance,individualism and collectivism,masculine versus feminine,uncertain avoidance are used as variables and it aims to conduct a systematic and comparative analysis of refuting speech act ways which are influenced by different cultural dimensions and the influence of cultural dimensions on those interlocutors.Therefore,all the data are collected and analyzed to solve the following problems:(1)What are the ways of refuting speech act in China and America?(2)What are the similarities and differences about the ways of refuting speech acts in China and America?(3)What are the influences of different cultural dimensions on the choice of refuting speech act ways in China and America?According to the research,Chinese people who advocate collectivism are more inclined to use euphemistic indirect strategies to protect the face of both parties when performing refuting speech acts.On the contrary,American speakers who advocate individualism are more inclined to use direct strategies to achieve the clear purpose of talking when performing refuting speech acts.Besides,the refuting speech act ways in American language are more abundant than those in Chinese.This research can not only enrich studies of speech acts,but also put forward the cultural factors that need to be paid attention to in intercultural communications.What’s more,the research findings can also provide a reliable reference for daily intercultural communication and enhance communicative competence of the interlocutors.In addition,people who live in different cultural backgrounds are affected by different cultural factors and they will adopt variable ways of expressions.Besides,the differences between languages have always been the main factors causing communication failures and pragmatic failures in intercultural communication.Thus,we should not only be aware of the differences in language forms,master the language use rules of the target language,but understand the cultural factors contained in the language and realize effective communication by expressing communicative intentions appropriately in order to reduce misunderstanding,embarrassment and even offense maximally in intercultural communications.Thus,it is helpful to study how communicators in China and America express their communicative intentions in specific situations effectively and appropriately and achieve success in communications.Besides,the research about refuting in China and America may have certain enlightenment for daily intercultural communications and the cross-border exchanges or cooperation.