Abstract

In cross-cultural communication, it is crucial for language speakers to use and understand the language properly in a certain socio-cultural context while refusals are one of the most frequent performances that people often use in our daily communications. When refusing people, especially speakers from different countries, many misunderstandings come out. Among all the mistakes, the disregard of potential social norms may induce more serious consequences.

Consequently, this paper is aimed to analyze and compare the similarities and differences of refusals between Chinese and Americans from the view of intercultural communications. According to theoretical frameworks of the speech act theory and politeness principles, the paper tends to work out similarities and differences of refusal strategies adopted by Chinese and American speakers. Furthermore, the study attempts to figure out the underlying cultural factors which affect choosing refusal strategies by some daily examples. The results show that, on the one hand, both Chinese and Americans use the same indirect refusal strategies. On the other hand, Chinese, to some extent, are more indirect than Americans when they employ refusals due to face-threatening acts.  

Keywords: refusal strategy; face; politeness; culture; comparison

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1.Introduction1

2.Literature Review2

3.Study of Relevant Theories 4

3.1 Refusal speech act4

3.2 Grice’s cooperative principle (CP)4

3.3 Politeness theory.5

3.4 Summary.5

4.Similarity& Difference of Refusal Speech Acts in Sino-American

Speakers 5

4.1 Similarity of refusal speech acts in Sino-American speakers5

4.2 Different refusal speech acts in Sino-American speakers6

5. Analysis of the Refusal Strategies10

5.1 Refusal strategies in communication context.10

5.2 Influential factors of the refusal strategies10

6. Conclusion12

Works Cited.14