Research On Indirect Refusals From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

In my dissertation, I do research on indirect refusals in daily conversation based on speech act theory and other pragmatic theories combined with politeness principles. Through analyses, I summarize that people usually violate the cooperative maxims to realize the aim of refusal indirectly, and most of these indirect refusals are out of politeness.According to the speech act theory, we can explain why people can succeed in refusing others indirectly. This is because the illocutionary act of refusal can be implemented by any means, so I dare say, one can never neglect speech act theory when doing research on indirect refusals. Indirect refusals express a kind of implied meanings to make distinction between what people say and what people imply, so we must have some knowledge of the theory of conversational implicature. In our life, to achieve certain goals, people sub-consciously or even unconsciously follow cooperative principles (CP for short) to accomplish various successful conversations. There are four categories of maxims under the cooperative principles:Quantity Maxim, Quality Maxim, Relation Maxim, Manner Maxim. Indirect refusals can be produced by means of violating the four maxims. However, if we take a closer look, we can find when people refuse indirectly, actually they are also following CP, they only deliberately ignore the maxims to achieve implied meanings, which they hope can convey their unwillingness or inability of doing the things requested by others. To the addressees, they must assume the information imparted by the speaker is relevant to their conversation. But the reason why the speaker violate the maxims must lie in that they want to get across some unspoken meanings, so through inference, the listeners can successfully understand the real intention.Besides the above theoretical bases, indirect speech act and violation of the maxims of CP are both out of politeness. If people want to express refusals and at the same time they want to maintain good relationship with others, then they must consider politeness, therefore, in order to make up this kind of insufficiency, G N Leech proposed politeness principle to "rescue" the cooperation principle. For the particularity of refusal "a threatening behavior threatening the requestor's face", this paper adopts face view and politeness principle to make refusals be polite. What the optimal successful communication demands is improving some indirect refusals to be beneficial to interpersonal harmony, but not being against your willingness to do what you do not want to do.Earlier studies on refusals are not few, but their theories and research directions are roughly the same. Their studies focus on the composition and strategies of refusals. Although they provides a comprehensive reference, these researches are from the angles of syntactic, semantic and refusal strategies, which lack theoretical bases for induction. This paper puts forward the new research results from the angle of pragmatic views.The study confines refusals in private language communications, failing to jump off such limitations to study refusals used by a particular group of people, so examples presented in this thesis are still from communications in daily life. After making a comparison and discussion of the data collected, the conclusion is reached as followings: indirect refusals are what most people choose, and these refusals are prone to be the violation of CP maxims.This paper helps deepen and enrich the theories about refusals. It supplies thorough analyses of many examples by using relevant pragmatic theories. The following questions are paid more attention to and will be solved through the dissertation:1.How can we use indirect speech act theory to explain indirect refusals with examples?2.How do indirect refusals violate the maxims of co-operational principle? Are they really uncooperative in the real conversation?3.How can we combine all the theories perfectly and closely with indirect refusals?...