中美拒绝语的对比研究.pdfVIP

Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Dai Xiaodong, who takes time from his busy schedule to meticulously scrutinize my paper and gives me a lot of constructive advice as well as insightful suggestions. My thanks also go to all the other professors of Foreign Language College of Shanghai Normal University, from whom I learn not only the linguistic knowledge but also the earnest attitude in making researches. Last but not least, I would like to thank many of my friends who help me collect data either in U.S.A or in China, and my fellow classmates who give me their valuable help and precious time in helping me work out my problems during every phase of writing the thesis. I feel grateful for such good companies upon my pursuit of academic achievements. My gratitude also goes to my parents, for all the encouragement, support and love they have given to me all the time. Abstract This thesis investigates Chinese and American refusal speech act from an intercultural communication perspective. The author, adopting Brown and Levinson’s face theory as a theoretic basis, Kim’s conversational constraints as a criterion, and DCT as an instrument, probes into the differences and commonalities between Chinese and American refusal speech act. Altogether 180 valid questionnaires are collected, 90 in each language, to study the influences of social variables on refusal speech act in different culture patterns. The findings show that in different cultures, both commonalities and differences exist concerning refusal speech act: (1) Chinese, featuring collectivism and HCC, are subject and sensitive to relative power when making decisions regarding refusal,