A Contrastive Study Of Refusal Strategies In Chinese, Japanese And English

This study investigates the similarities and differences of refusal speech act inChinese, Japanese and English from perspective of cross-cultural communicationwithin the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies.Language data are collected by means of a questionnaire, an oral discoursecompletion test, which consists of ten refusal situations (two requests and suggestions,and three invitations and offers) involving interlocutors of higher, equal and lowerstatus. Ninety people help with the questionnaire, and they fall into three groups:native Mandarin Chinese (MC) speakers, native Japanese (JJ) speakers, and nativeAmerican English (AE) speakers aging between twenty to thirty years old.Refusal responses from the questionnaires are defined and analyzed across thethree groups. The results show there are similarities as well as differences of refusalstrategies among the three languages. All groups use strategies of reason, regret, andalternative as well as more indirect strategies compared to direct strategies.Differences lie in the occurrence frequency, sequences and directness of strategieswith respect to dissimilarities of culture patterns and social status. In this manner, thethesis constructs a two-dimensional graph with cultural pattern differences on onestretch and sociolinguistic differences as social status on the other which integratesthe analyses of influential elements.Finally, the thesis proposes the interrelationship between cultural differences andrefusal realization patterns: cultural differences influence the refusal realizationpatterns on one hand;and preference of refusal realization patterns reveals culturaldifferences on the other hand.