A Study Of Refusal Strategies Between Chinese And American College Students

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the differences of speech act, especially for the differences of refusal. This thesis, starting from Austin and Searle's Speech Theory, attempts to examine culture differences in a social function of language from a new perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics, which is studied on the basis of Wierzbicka's theory.The survey is carried out among a portion of students from American and Chinese university in the form of DCT Questionnaire. The speech act examined here is that of substantive verbal refusals. The initiating acts of refusing are: requesting, inviting, offering, and suggestion. In the procedure of data analysis, the factor of social status is taken as a controlled variable. The results of the study are demonstrated and discussed on the basis of the data processed through independent sample t-test and Microsoft Excel with figures. From the dimension of culture difference and concepts, two groups are compared in details.The results indicate that, when American students and Chinese students make refusals, the strategies and refusal semantic formulas are different. On average, Americans will employ more refusal strategies than Chinese, and tend to be more directly. However, Chinese tend to be more sensitive to the interlocutor's status. They will apply different strategies to higher and lower status interlocutor-reason, regret and alternative to a higher status vs. reason, dissuasion and direct refusal to lower status-whereas Americans in these situations react similarly to status unequal of both types. Chinese subjects' excuses tend to be more specific and family oriented, while Americans tend to be more vague and mostly friend-oriented.There are still some limitations in the strata of subjects and theoretical aspects.