A Contrastive Study On Refusal Strategies By Chinese And U.S. Spokespersons In Press Conference

A speech act is an utterance that serves function in communication. We are performing aspeech act when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, orrefusal. Refusal is a kind of common phenomenon in human communication, however,refusal will threaten the interlocutor’s face, so some face and politeness strategies have to beemployed in performing the speech act of refusal to reduce the degree of the face threatening.The present research is intended to study refusal strategies employed by the spokespersons inChinese and American press conferences.Press conference is a means by which the governments directly release importantmessages to the press and the public, explaining the significant events and activities.Information released from the press conference can cover a wide range of areas, such aspolitics, economics, military, foreign affairs, and some sensitive issues. The spokespersonsare supposed to be skillful and vigilant enough to cope with any situations, they have tochoose the most appropriate language when confronted with questions concerning top secrets,national interests, and so on. Refusal strategies have to be used.The author randomly downloads50press conferences held in China and the United Statesrespectively from the Internet, and the time span is from July2012to September2012.Guided by the face and politeness theory (Brown&Levinson,1978) this thesis combines thequantitative and qualitative analysis’s methods and presents a cross—cultural contrastiveanalysis of the polite realization of refusals by spokespersons and accounts for the similaritiesand differences.The study reveals the following findings:1. The U.S. spokespersons uses more direct strategies than Chinese spokespersons.Chinese spokespersons employ the strategies of negative ability (0.85%) andnegative willingness (0.42%) as a refusal towards journalists’ questions. To a large extent, the U.S. spokespersons not only express negative willingness(6.11%) or employ inability (14.89%) refusal strategies but also refuses with aword “No”(0.65%).2. Both Chinese&U.S. spokespersons prefer to choose indirect refusal strategies.The most commonly used strategy for both data is “avoidance”(China:45.76%;US:16.02%). The American spokespersons use the following strategiessignificantly less often than the Chinese spokespersons:“avoidance”(China:45.76%; US:16.02%),“unspecific or indefinite reply”(China:16.95%; US:1.94%) and “statement of attitude or expectation”(China:19.49%; US:0.47%).The Chinese spokespersons use the following strategies significantly less oftenthan the American spokespersons:“statement of alternative”(China:5.51%; US:8.97%),“promise of future acceptance”(China:0.42%; US:2.78%),“askingback”(China:0; US:3.15%). The U.S. spokespersons use a fairly large numberof adjuncts, and this is not found in the Chinese press conferences.3. The possible reasons from several perspectives of high context vs. low context,rhetoric philosophy, religion origin, face perception and thinking patterns.This study has confirmed some of the previous research findings. The findings areexpected to offer some help for journalists and TV—viewers.