Contrastive Study On Polite Refusal Strategy

During the past two decades, the speech act of refusal has been popular subjects for investigation, particularly in the field of pragmatics. More recently the field of research has expanded to include the effects of social factors, such as relative power, gender difference and social distance. In addition, the cross-cultural pragmatics has paid considerable attention to the various strategies that speakers deploy when performing the speech act of refusal. This is because it has been seen to be subject to cross-linguistic/cultural variation in terms of use and interpretation. But to writer's knowledge, there are few contrastive studies on Chinese and American. In this thesis, the writer would like to describe and investigate the usage of a specific linguistic form associated with politeness from a sociolinguistic perspective. The main aim of this thesis is a study of linguistic phenomena in refusal. It examines the use of polite refusal strategies by Chinese and American. That is, to investigate the strategies in which refusal varies depending on the relationships that exist between the speakers and the hearers. Investigation includes variables of social identity such as the relative power and the social distance between the speakers and hearers. The result will be discussed in relation to existing theoretical framework of speech act and politeness. Chapter one is the introduction of the thesis. The writer puts forward the theme of the thesis – a pragmatic study on refusal strategies. Chapter two provides some basic background information concerning the politeness relating to the thesis which consists of socio-cultural and historical perspectives on politeness and functions of politeness.Chapter three is a review of literatures on speech acts and politeness theory. Compared with the other two views, the face-saving cal view, proposed in Brown and Levinson's theory (1978 and 1987), provides the theoretical framework that this thesis is based on. Chapter four discusses the influence of different cultural values on the use of speech acts. Chapter five deals with the research methodology used in this study. It begins with a description of the subject, all undergraduate students of Chinese and American universities. Following this, after a discussion of questionnaire, three criteria are used to draw up questions: social distance are relative power are addressed. Finally, analysis of the data is presented.Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis.