Refusals in Chinese: How Do L1 and L2 Differ?

Abstract: This article reports on an empirical study of refusal strategies in Chinese by native speakers (NS) and nonnative Chinese learners (NNS). Sixty subjects (perceived as ''students'') were to refuse an invitation by ''the professor'' to a Chinese New Year's party. The study found that the NS group produced 10 strategies, whereas the NNS group produced seven strategies. Among the total number of strategies, both groups favored the use of ''apology'' and ''explanation'' with similar frequency while differing in the choice of other strategies and their usage frequency. In direct refusals, the author noticed negative L1 (English) pragmatic transfer of NNS. The study found that L1 and L2 refusals in Chinese present fewer similarities and more differences, presumably due to the lack of L1 intercultural knowledge of L2 learners. Key words: Chinese, culture, pedagogical pragmatics, second language acquisition, speech acts (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Introduction Human interactions do not consist of purely linguistic expressions, but rather performances of certain types of acts, such as requesting, refusing, apologizing, or making statements. People from different cultures tend to perform those acts within the sociocultural norms recognized by their societies. Linguists have tried to determine the affecting factors for different linguistic strategies of one speech act preferred by one culture but avoided by another. The desire to understand such differences and to improve the cross-cultural communicative competence in foreign language classrooms has thus generated great interest in research on preferred patterns for speech acts in the native language (L1) and comparisons with a foreign/ second language (L2). Refusal, as ''a major cross-cultural sticking point for many nonnative speakers'' (Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990, p. 56), has been widely studied from different perspectives for its importance in cross-cultural communication and sociolinguistics. Linguists as well as L2 educators have paid particular attention to the ways that refusals are formulated by native speakers (NS) and the possible explanations for failures in expressing refusals by nonnative speakers (NNS). For example, Beebe et al. investigated the pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals by comparing three groups of subjects (Japanese speaking Japanese, Japanese speaking English, Americans speaking English). In the refusal strategies by Japanese speaking English and Americans speaking English, the study found negative pragmatic transfer in three areas: (1) the order of semantic formulas, (2) the frequency of semantic formulas, and (3) the content of semantic formulas. Similarly, Felix-Brasdefer (2003) conducted a crosscultural study of pragmatic strategies for declining invitations in American English and Latin American Spanish. The study found that the group of Americans speaking English (ENG-ENG) was more direct than the Latin American speakers of Spanish (SPN-SPN), and the Americans speaking Spanish (ENG-SPN) exhibited an intermediate frequency of directness. Felix- Brasdefer (2003, p. 249) concluded that ''high levels of grammatical competence in the L2 do not always correspond to high levels of sociocultural ability,'' and the lack of L2 sociocultural knowledge was a crucial factor affecting the ENG-SPN group's performance in refusing. Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1991) examined the rejections used by NS and proficient NNS of English during academic advising sessions and found that NNS were less predictably able to employ ''status preserving strategies'' (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1991, p. 41) in making successful rejections than the NS were. According to Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, status-preserving strategies are employed in a given speech event to ''match [the] speaker's status and the appropriateness of speech acts given that status'' (1991, pp. 41-42). They concluded that the unsuccessful rejections1 by the NNS were because they did not use the appropriate forms and content necessary for successful rejections. …