A Study On Chinese And English Strategies In Refusals And Compliments From Cross-cultural Perspective

As a universal social phenomenon, politeness extensively exists in all human societies, which is not only a norm of social activities, but also a symbol of civilization. Generally speaking, politeness has its binding effect on every member of the society, which plays a crucial role in helping establish, maintain friendly interpersonal relationship and facilitate social interactions. Successful communication and good communicative result mainly depend on appropriate polite languages.Linguistic politeness is a universal phenomenon and it is a vehicle for the maintenance of social equilibrium, therefore the appropriate use of politeness is the key to success. At the same time, politeness is not only an observable social phenomenon, but also is the reflection of specific cultural values in languages. Because of the differences of cultural backgrounds, different people have different understanding of politeness, different social backgrounds have different politeness connotation, politeness manifestation and standards of judgment and languages differ greatly from culture to culture in expressing and judging politeness. If people who come from one culture impose their own principles of politeness formulae on the people who are from another culture, the cross-cultural communication may break down. Therefore, exploring politeness, we must consider cultural specificity and accordingly go into the depth where cultural values are firmly rooted. Only in doing so can we discover the essence of politeness and successfully account for its cross-cultural differences.Based on thinking of these aspects, the author intends to research politeness from the intercultural perspective, chooses the typical phenomena of politeness—refusals and compliments as the study focuses to analyze the discrepancies of Chinese and English politeness in order to get the main cause of politeness discrepancy between Chinese and English-speaking countries, so that make people accomplish communication smoothly. The author proposes the following four questions in this study:(1) How do Chinese and English refuse each other in daily life?(2) How do Chinese and English compliment each other in daily life?(3) What are Chinese and English subjects'own interpretation of refusal patterns and compliment patterns?(4) What are the causes of such differences in refusals and compliments?With the aim of ensuring the comparison of cross-culture, getting a better use of politeness strategies, by using the Discourse Completion Test, this paper makes an empirical research on the refusal strategies and compliment strategies adopted by 50 Chinese university students and 40 English native speakers who come to China to study knowledge. In the procedure of data analysis, the factor of social status was taken as a controlled variable while other factors such as age and sex were not taken into consideration. After the scientific analysis of data, the findings are acquired.The empirical result shows that there are some similarities as well as a large number of discrepancies in the choice of refusal strategies and compliment strategies between Chinese and English native speakers. (1) In refusal strategies, the similarities are:both groups tend to use indirect strategies instead of direct strategies which indicates that both Chinese culture and English culture recognize that indirect refusal is more polite than direct refusal; however, the differences lie in the frequency and contents of direct and indirect strategies and different degree of sensitivity to the social status between Chinese and English native speakers. In addition, Chinese students are more inclined to indirect strategies and more sensitive to the mode of communication when making refusals.(2) In compliment strategies, the similarities are:both groups tend to accept compliments from the one who has the lower and equal social status. However, Compared with Chinese, English native speakers prefer to accept compliment from others. Besides, there are different cultural values orientations responsible for the choice of strategies by both groups, for instance, Chinese more care about the social public image than English native speakers.This thesis provides some new sights for fully understanding the concept of cultural value. It is helpful for communicators to avoid some social pragmatic failures and for them to improve culture and cross-cultural communicative competence. But owning to the limitation of author's time and ability, there is still room for improvement, especially in the choice of subjects and analysis of data.