A Comparative Study of Refusal Speech Acts in Chinese and American English
Bibliographic record
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 Resume: Dans la vie quotidienne, il nous arrive souvent de refuser les autres. Les actes de discours de refus est aussi une problematique importante dans les recherches de la pragmatique. Selon la theorie des actes de discours d’Austin et de Searle ainsi que le principe de politesse de Brown et de Levinson, l’article present execute une etude comparative des actes de discours de refus des Chinois et des Americains. Il existe des points communs entre eux, par exemple, les memes caracteristiques des actes de refus : l’utilisation des trois ordres directs dans les actes de discours, a savoir, actes de discours de refus direct, capacite de refus et actes de disours de refus indirect ; la preference pour les actes de refus indirect ; la tendance d’alienation semblable du contexte. Mais il se trouve aussi des differences sous l’influence de la culture. Les Americains sont plus directs que les Chinois dans les actes de refus. Les Chinois s’efforcent de miniment l’impact negatif des actes de refus sur l’interlocuteur en utilisant des strategies de politess, parce que, d’apres eux, le refus direct blessent la face de l’autre partie. D’ailleurs, le niveau d’alienation du contexte du chinois est inferieur a celui de l’anglais americain. Ces ecarts sont dus aux differentes conceptions de la valeur culturelle des deux pays, les Americains preconisent la personnalite et l’egalite alors que les Chinois insistent sur la collectivite et la hierarchie sociale. Mots-Cles: actes de discours de refus, Chine et Etats-Unis, comparaison, conception de la valeur
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".