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.69697

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

摘要在跨文化交际中，语言使用者能在一个特定的社会文化环境中正确的使用和理解语言尤为重要。而拒绝用语在我们日常交际中是使用最频繁的一类交际用语。然而当我们拒绝别人时，特别是当我们拒绝其他国家的人时，许多误解就会随之而来。在这些误解中，对社会行为准则的忽视往往会引起更为严重的后果。

因此，本文旨在从跨文交际的视角，借助于一些理论框架，分析、对比中美两国人民拒绝言语行为及其策略的异同。此外本研究试图通过一些日常生活中的例子来分析影响两国人选取拒绝言语行为策略的潜在的文化价值因素。研究结果表明，一方面中美两国人在实施间接拒绝言语时，都会采取相类似的策略，另一方面由于中国人认为拒绝别人是件有损面子的事所以中国人在使用拒绝言语时会比美国人更含蓄。

毕业论文关键词：拒绝策略；面子；礼貌；文化；比较

Contents

1. Introduction…1

2. Literature Review…2

3. Study of Relevant Theories …...….4

3.1 Refusal speech act..4

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 speakers..5

4.2 Different refusal speech acts in Sino-American speakers…....6

5. Analysis of the Refusal Strategies..10

5.1 Refusal strategies in communication context.10

5.2 Influential factors of the refusal strategies..…10

6. Conclusion…..12

Works Cited.14

1. Introduction 

With the development of globalization and internationalization, it is inevitable for people to contact with those who have different cultures and linguistics. In order to achieve effective communications, people should convey correct information and understand intended meanings successfully. Therefore, people are required to master languages and cultures in corresponding cross-cultural interactions. As Searle puts it"The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word or sentence,… but rather the production of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of the speech act"(Searl 1969). Refusal speech is the performance of refusal acts. In the past decades, many studies were carried out, center on the performance of the speech act when complimenting , apologising and inviting somebody to do something in various communicative contexts. Notwithstanding, Comparisons in regard to refusals are not much investigated. Furthermore, most of the refusal speech act researches are conducted previously about English and other languages, such as Arabic, Spanish and Japanese. However, only few studies have been centered on so far concerning the refusal speech acts between Chinese speakers and English native speakers. This paper aims to compare, analyze and discuss the two countries’ similar and different refusal speech acts.论文网