A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Thai Refusal Languages

Refusal is an avoidable verbal communicative act in daily life which also can be in form of a speech act.Speech act not only imply the emotions of oneself(the listener)but also,affect the relationship between two parties.Therefore,people will use strategies and varieties of refusal methods to reduce the strong refuse which can make more compromise situation to the listener.Different cultural backgrounds between China and Thailand causes different ways of strategies in rejection.In the process of learning and teaching Chinese,the author found that Thai-Chinese learners,due to cross-cultural differences and communication barriers,always misuse refusal methods.Hence,the study of the differences between Chinese and Thai refusal will help learners to understand how to use refusal and reduce the misuse which caused by cross-cultural differences so,learners will able to make communication more smoothly.This study transcribes 200 refusal corpuses from three of Chinese TV dramas and four of Thai TV dramas with comparable content.This study mainly explores the structural forms of refusal in Chinese and Thai,as well as the speech strategies used.This study uses Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory to analyze the social factors that influence the choice of refusal strategies between Chinese and Thai.The study finds that the refusal structure between Chinese and Thai mainly consist of three parts: refusal introductory language(A),refusal central language(B)and refusal auxiliary language(C).The most common structural type between Chinese and Thai is “B+C/C+B/B+C+B/C+B/C+B+C”.Chinese uses this structure type more frequently than Thai.There are 17 indirect refusal strategies and one direct refusal strategy in common use.In the corpus of this study,both Chinese and Thai use more of direct refusal strategy than indirect refusal strategy,which are more frequently used in Chinese and Thai,mainly concentrate on “criticism attack”,“pointing out unreasonable” and “explaining objective reasons”.This study also explores the influence of social factors on the usage of refusal between Chinese and Thai according to three aspects: social status,social distance and,gender differences,as well as the influence of four types of priming refusal: request,suggestion,arrangement and,invitation on the choice of refusal strategies.It is found that different types of initiators affect the use of refusal strategies.For example,in the case of “request”,Chinese and Thai use the least direct refusal strategy;Chinese use the most direct refusal strategy under the condition of “invitation”,while Thai is the case of “arrangement”.For the indirect refusal strategy,“criticism attack” and “pointing out unreasonable” are the most use for Chinese people while Thai people tent to use “explain objective reasons” strategy.