Comparative Study On Refusal Speech Acts Performed By Chinese And East Africans

Language is considered as a major tool for communication, and is closely bondwith culture. Refusal, as a common speech act in daily communication, is facethreatening and impolite in nature. Thus, the appropriate use of refusal strategies iscritical for successful cross-cultural communication. In order to soften the facethreatening in refusals, speakers usually choose polite refusal strategies. This thesismakes a comparative study on refusal speech acts performed by Chinese and EastAfrican subjects from a cross-cultural perspective, on the basis of speech act theoriesand politeness theories. The relevant theories include: Austin’s speech act theory,Searle’s indirect speech act theory, Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, and Gu’sChinese politeness principle. An investigation into different refusal strategies used byChinese and East Africans, and an analysis on the cultural difference underlyingdifferent choice of refusal strategies were conducted.Data was collected by using a Discourse Completion Test.80Chinese and80East Africans students were asked to answer a written Chinese and Englishquestionnaire respectively. The questionnaire consists of12scenarios, involving threetypes of social status persons, and four kinds of refusal speech acts, including request,offer, invitation and suggestion. The Chinese and English questionnaires share thesame scenarios.Through data analysis, this study concludes the major findings:(1) There are both similarities and differences in refusal speech act performed byChinese and East Africans.(2) The similarities include: a) Both groups are likely to use more indirectstrategies than direct ones; b) Both care about the refusees’ social status, and tend tochoose more indirect strategies to refuse a person with higher and equal status thanthe one with lower status. c) Among the indirect strategies, reason and regret are thefavored ones for both groups. The similarities indicate that people from differentcultures have some common views about politeness.(3) The differences lie in that: a) The Chinese are more sensitive to interlocutor’ssocial status. They show comparatively a slightly larger gap in refusal strategies whenresponding to different social-status persons, and they tend to use more indirectrefusal strategies. When refusing to an equal or higher-status person, Chinese are likely to use more strategies of reason and alternative, while the East Africans respondwith more promise and false acceptance. When refusing to a lower-status person,Chinese usually do not use false acceptance, but East Africans use more falseacceptance and promise. b) East Africans utilize more total strategies than Chinese.(4) Different choice of refusal strategies reflects different cultural patterns. Thedeep-level cultural patterns are: a) Confucian-based Collectivism vs Ubuntu-basedCollectivism: Although China and East Africa are both collective societies, Chineseplace more emphasis on collectivism than East Africans. In other words, the EastAfricans attach more importance to relative individualism. Besides, Chinesecollectivism focuses on modesty while East African collectivism focuses on honor andtruth. b) High power distance vs. relatively low power distance: Greatly influenced bytraditional Confucianism, the Chinese value the interpersonal harmony and emphasizethe hierarchy of relationships; while East African culture has been influenced by thetraditional notion of Ubuntu and European colonial cultures in the long history ofwestern colonial rule in Africa, the East Africans relatively de-emphasize thecentralized hierarchy. c) Long-term orientation vs. Short-term orientation: Chineseculture is of long-term orientation while East Africans is of short-term orientation. d)Written tradition vs. oral tradition: China has a long history of written tradition, whichmakes Chinese perform speech acts in a formal way. East Africa has a long history oforal tradition, which means East Africans perform speech acts in an informal way.It seems that none has been found to compare the refusals between Chinese andEast Africans from a cross-cultural perspective. It is the first time that this researchhas adopted long-term/short-term orientation and written/oral tradition to explain thedifferent refusal speech acts performed by Chinese and East African people. Theresearch is useful to guide participants to reduce the pragmatic failure in cross-culturalcommunication. To some extent, it can enrich the studies on politeness. It can providean enlightenment to international student administration and English foreign languageteaching and learning.