| Requests and refusals are both the most representative face-threatening acts which have different regular patterns in different cultures and different language contexts. Refusals of requests in the Chinese context are the least studied, and these studies tend to analyze refusal from the perspective of semantic content. Through the analysis of the basic theoretical background information concerning perspectives on face theories, face threatening acts, indirectness and politeness, and Brown and Levinson s politeness model and refusal in Chinese context, this study explores the concepts of request and refusal and their individual strategies, especially refusal models in the Chinese request setting and the relationship between request strategies and refusal strategies. In order to build frameworks of request strategies and refusal strategies in the contemporary Chinese setting, on the basis of the analysis of the frequently used speech act research methods, forty corpora are established by collecting almost all adjacency pairs of request refusal from video clips in the thirty five contemporary Chinese teledramas from the two perspectives of social power and distance.Through a comprehensive analysis of the various request strategies, including head acts, internal and external modifications, twenty seven request refusal strategies are identified in the corpora in their respective nine situations of the contemporary Chinese teledramas from the perspective of two social variables. It is found that Chinese people have a tendency towards more naturalness and straightforwardness in the real life, and the Chinese do not pay more attention to facework as revealed from the previous studies. And a strong tendency is to employ request or refusal strategies based more on social distance than social power. It is revealed that the most corresponding strategy framework of the refusal strategies and request strategies is the use of excuse, reason or explanation as a refusal strategy to refuse a request strategy of the mood derivable with the most ideal internal modification of the downtoner device and the external modification of the grounder in the contemporary Chinese. It is the case that the most corresponding strategy framework of the refusal strategies and request strategies is different in the different conditions of relative status and relative social distance.The value of the present study also lies in the light it sheds on the influence of methodology on research outcomes. Contemporary Chinese teledramas offer the efficiency in building the corpora, while teledrama video clips guarantee the naturalness and authenticity of the data. The combination of contemporary Chinese teledramas and teledrama video clips has been proven methodologically significant in this study. The request-refusal strategy frameworks found in this study will benefit foreign Chinese learners in strategically using the Chinese refusal speech acts, improving their linguistic consciousness, and enhancing their possibility of successful communication and their cross-cultural communicative competence. |
