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Canadian Social Science Vol.3 No.4 August 2007 A Comparative Study of Refusal Speech Acts in Chinese and American English ETUDE COMPARATIVE DES ACTES DE DISCOURS DE REFUS DANS LE CHINOIS ET L’ANGLAIS AMERICAIN Li Honglin1 Abstract: Refusals are frequently performed in our daily lives, and the speech act of refusals is one significant research topic in Pragmatics. Based on the speech act theory of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), with the theoretical frame of the politeness theory put forward by Brown and Levinson, This paper presents a comparative study of speech acts of refusal in Chinese and American English (AE). The results show that refusals vary in directness with situations and cultures, just like other speech acts, yet there are some similarities between Chinese and AE. On the one hand, both languages employ the three directness types, namely the direct refusal speech act, ability of negation and indirect refusal speech act, and prefer indirect refusals. The situational variability of directness in both languages follows a similar trend. On the other hand, Americans are more direct than Chinese and Chinese sincere refusals are considered as face-threatening acts, which call for politeness strategies to minimize the negative effects on the addressee(s). Furthermore, Chinese shows the lower degree of situational variation in the use of the three directness types. From all these evidence, we maintain that the cross-linguistic differences are due to basic differences in cultural values, i.e., Americans value individualism and equality, while Chinese value collectivism and social hierarchy. Key words: Refusal Speech Act, Chinese-American, Comparison, Cultural Values Résumé: Dans la vie quotidienne, il nous arrive souvent de re