A Cross-cultural Study On Refusal Strategies In Chinese And American Tv Series

Up to now, the speech act of refusal has been a hot topic in many fields such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and anthropology. Many researchers have already probed into refusal speech acts in various languages from different approaches, such as second language acquisition approach and cross-cultural pragmatic approach. Yet most of the studies deal with the comparison of English and other languages rather than Chinese. Only a handful of studies focus on the comparative study of Chinese and English, and these studies tend to analyze refusal strategies from the cross-cultural pragmatic perspective. Few of these studies are from cultural value perspective. In the mean time, almost all the previous studies use discourse completion tests to collect data, no previous studies collect data form TV series. There is a definite need to study refusal strategies on the data collected from TV series.Based on Chen and Zhang's (1995) study, this paper categorizes situations of refusal according to four initiating acts which are invitation, offer, suggestion and request. The analysis in this paper falls into two parts. First, the study analyzes the frequencies of commonly used refusal strategies to each initiating act in America and China, other factors influencing the selection of refusal strategies such as relationship and social status of the interlocutors are also examined under each initiating act. Second, the study discusses cultural values revealed through the different use of refusal strategies, for example, how Chinese and American think differently about family relationship, social relationship and friendship.This research aims to explore the similarities and differences of the refusal strategies adopted by American and Chinese as well as the cultural values reflected in their choice of refusal strategies. Nine social life TV series are chosen, including seven Chinese and two American. The data collect from TV series are refusals given by people from different social status and relationship which include parents and children, close friends, acquaintances as well as superiors and inferiors regardless of people's age, gender, educational background, etc. A total of 960 refusals are found for the two groups, which consist of 480 refusals for Chinese and 480 refusals for Americans. All the data are coded following the coding scheme proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). The analysis of the data takes into account the frequency of and preference for each refusal strategy.The result shows that there are some similarities as well as a large number of differences in the choice of refusal strategies between American and Chinese. Both prefer indirect strategies in most cases which mean that politeness is what people in both cultures are concerned about. However, due to cultural differences, these two groups display respective characteristics as well. There are three major findings in their refusal strategies:first, in comparison with Americans, Chinese use more indirect refusal strategies which are influenced by their high context cultural values; second, Chinese use different refusal strategies to people in different status and relationship. While the relationship and social status of the interlocutors do not exert much influence upon refusal strategies in America; third, this study also reveals how Chinese and American think differently about relationship. As a collectivist country, Chinese treat friends and family members differently from American. Friend and family mean more dependence and obligation in China than in America.This thesis gives readers clear understanding about Chinese and American cultural values influencing the choice of refusal strategies, hence help people alleviate uneasiness and barriers in cross-cultural interaction so as to improve their intercultural communication competence.