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Felix-Brasdefer (2002) made a survey of the refusal behaviors demonstrated respectively by the native Spanish speakers inMexico, native English speakers and Spanish speakers in theUnited States. It was found that communication environments do influence the types and numbers of strategies people actually choose for refusal. The Spanish speakers in theUnited Statesseldom use lexical and syntactic mechanisms to ease the embarrassment of refusing atmosphere. It was suggested that living in the multi-cultural environment can facilitate foreign language acquisition.

However, compared with other speech acts, studies on refusals are relatively rare. By far contributions have been made to the study of this topic in some fieldsa, and most studies of refusal strategy were mainly from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic perspective. Studies on gender differences in refusals are rather scarce, and Rubin is the first man who does some researches on refusals. Rubin (1983: 12-13) lists nine form-function relations which represent indirect refusal strategies with some specific examples for each strategy. She also paid attention to acquisition of communicative competence for a proper producing and understallding of refusals by nomiative speakers in certain language. According to Beebe ( 1990 ), "refusal is a principle of cross-cultural 'Sticking point',for many nonnative speakers, and for this reason they are also significant for second language educators and others involved in cross-cultural interaction. "

1.1.2 Studies in China

The word "refuse" is regarded as saying "no" to certain initiating act, such as request, invitation and offer, which reveals unwilling feeling to the required things or to the addresser. Chen et al (1995) addressed that Chinese refusal is relative to Chinese mianzi面子and lian脸, Which represants a person’s public image. In his work, Chen defined "refusal" as a responding act where the speaker denies the undertaking of an action proposed by the interlocutor. Here, he focused on the socio-pragmatic study in Chinese refusals and thereby divided Chinese refusals into substantive refusals and ritual refusals.

Ma Yuelan ( 1999 ) made a comparative study of refusal speech acts between Chinese and American people. She considers that comparative research from a pragmatic point of view is an important way to promote mutual understanding between Chinese and American people, and meanwhile it can help to improve the effectiveness of refusal speech act in cross-cultural communication. Later in 2002, Ma Yuelan conducted another comparative study of American and Chinese refusal behaviors by way of discourse analysis and found many similarities between the two. The only difference existent lies in the frequency of using strategies which varies with culture.

Wang Aihua & Wu Guiliang (2005) have done a research on the social factors that influence the refusal speech acts of Chinese and American college students within the theoretical framework of Brown & Levinson' s Politeness Principle. The data was collected by means of a "discourse completion test". 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。