A Contrastive Research On Refusal Speech Acts By Chinese And American Spokespersons

Refusal speech act, due to its inherent face-threatening nature and high demand for pragmatic competence, has become a heated topic in cross-cultural research field. Different cultures tend to have their own conventional norms and patterns for the appropriate performance of refusals. If people are ignorant of these norms and patterns, unnecessary conflict and friction would come out, which does harm to harmony of interpersonal interaction. Therefore, under the background of the increase in intercultural communication, contrastive study of refusal speech act seems to be all the more necessary and crucial.This paper conducts a contrastive study of refusal performance by Chinese and American spokespersons in regular press conferences concerned with the internationally-oriented hot issues-the North Korean Issues and the Iran Nuclear Issues from January2012to December2013, aiming at addressing the following three questions: l.What are the similarities and differences in the comparison of Chinese and American spokespersons’direct and indirect refusal percentage?2. What are the similarities and differences in the choice of specific direct and indirect refusal strategies?3. What are the underlying cultural patterns that can account for the research findings?This paper, based on speech act theory, conversational principle, politeness theory, and Beebe et al’s (1990) refusal classification with some adjustment, categorizes166Chinese refusal data and329American data into two broad types:direct refusal and indirect refusal after carefully sorting them out from spokespersons’ responses. Then Three direct strategy categories and eight indirect strategy sorts are identified. After comparing the percentage of direct and indirect refusals and choice of specific direct and indirect refusal strategies, this paper applies politeness universality and three dimensions of cultural patterns (high context&low-context, collectivism&individualism, formality&informality) to account for the research findings.The research findings show that1.Chinese indirect refusal percentage is96%and direct one is4%. American indirect refusal percentage is68%and direct one is32%. Accordingly, indirect refusals in both groups far surpass direct refusals but Chinese indirect percentage yet greatly exceeds that of Americans in spite of the similarity in preference for indirect refusals.2. American spokespersons employ more refusal strategies, covering all the subcategories under direct and indirect refusal strategies while Chinese spokespersons adopt comparatively less refusal strategies types, syntactically shorter refusals. Strategies of direct saying "no","asking back","joke","evaluating the request" are not found in Chinese data. As regard to the specific strategy use, Chinese spokespersons show preference for "statement of wish/attitude","avoidance", and "unspecific reply" whereas American counterparts favor "avoidance","statement of reason/explanation","statement of wish/attitude", and "statement of alternative". Among strategies exceeding average percentage, proportion of "unspecific reply","statement of wish/attitude" in Chinese data significantly exceeds that in Americans data whereas American percentage in strategy of "postponement","statement of alternative" is comparatively much higher. In addition, refusal adjuncts like "pause fillers","address terms" frequently appear in American data but never appear in Chinese data.3. Politeness universality results in both groups’ preference for indirect refusals. However, Chinese spokespersons are inclined to be more indirect and implicit in the choice of refusal strategies due to Chinese formal collectivism culture with high-context communication styles while American spokespersons tend to be more direct and explicit for American informal individualism culture with low-context communication style.This study, stepping beyond the informal setting to analyze naturally-occurring refusal speech act in formal institutional context, contributes to enlightening further studies to explore refusal speech act from more extensive perspectives and benefit journalists and spokespersons in better understanding and appropriate performance of cross-cultural refusals.