A Study On Refusal Speech Acts In Business Communication Between Chinese And Americans

On the basis of Austin and Searle's speech act theory, refusal speech act theory and Brown & Levinson's face theory, this paper is a contrastive study of refusal speech act between Chinese and Americans in business communication.Based on a modified version of the discourse completion test (DCT) developed by Beebe et al. (1990), a survey was conducted. The responses from 60 participants were used in this study for detailed examination, including both 30 Chinese and 30 Americans who were employers and employees from several business organizations and trade companies. The data were collected through the DCT and analyzed by both quantitative and qualitative methods. The author analyzes the frequencies of refusal strategies, and the influence of the social power and social distance on the realization of refusal. Meanwhile, on the basis of cultural differences, the author finds out the factors influencing the strategies used between Chinese and Americans in business communication.The result of the analysis reveals that the Chinese and American participants on one hand share some similarities in refusal speech act, but on the other hand, they do distinguish from each other in terms of refusal strategies. In business communication, Chinese subjects tend to employ direct strategy from the higher-to-lower status situation, while Americans prefer the euphemism strategy. From lower-to-higher status situation, Chinese are more likely to employ indirect strategies to express politeness than Americans. To peers, American subjects utilize the direct strategy most frequently. With the increase of social distance, both Chinese and Americans are more likely to use indirect strategies than direct strategies to make a refusal. However, with the decrease of social distance, Chinese subjects prefer to employ indirect strategies, while Americans are likely to select direct strategy. At the same time, cultural factors affect the options of pragmatic strategies. The relationships are decided by social power and social distance in China. Therefore, the Chinese participants hold the sense of hierarchy, ideas of politeness and face, while most American peers do not consider about these.This study is of value in probing into the appropriateness of speech act of refusal between Chinese and Americans in business communication, to some extent, which can help the Chinese and American employers and employees raise the cross-cultural awareness, enhance the strategic use of this speech act and eventually increase the chances of success in the communication and promote the communicative competence in this field.