A Multimodal Analysis Of Refuse

This study discusses the characteristics of speech act of refuse in a multimodal corpus of English films.The framework for the implementation of refuse speech act of native speakers from the video corpus can provide guidance for second language English learners.Since systemic functional linguistics was introduced in 1989 regarding language as a social symbol,functional linguistics and discourse analysis have shown a trend from mono-modality to multimodality,which makes multimodal discourse analysis one of the hottest topics in linguistics and communication studies.In speech acts,refuse is a “non-cooperative response” to the speaker’s request,invitation,or suggestion,which should be paid special attention in the process of language learning.It is of importance to know how to figure out the speaker’s refusal intention in advance with the aid of multimodal film corpus to reduce face-threatening damage.In this study,by applying coding system and ELAN annotation to the video corpus of refuse speech acts,the modes with the highest frequency,the co-occurrence of modes,and the reasons for the distribution of such modes were emphatically discussed.Results showed that people tend to be more direct in their expression of refusal intention;the co-occurrence pairs are all “indirect” in language mode,but more “direct” in non-verbal acts.Male outperforms female in hand gestures,head gestures,and posture,while females focus more on facial expressions and prosody when refusing.Young adults show more diversity and directness than Middle-age group in all modes except for the head and eye movement.The coding system and multimodal refusal corpus built in this paper will set examples for similar researches,and the refusal corpus is expected to be applied in second language learning and teaching.