Saying “no” in emails in Mandarin Chinese and Australian English

Abstract

The present study examined the differences between Mandarin Chinese and Australian English in email refusals. An email production questionnaire (EPQ) and retrospective verbal reports (RVR) were used to collect data. Results showed that while both groups preferred directness to indirectness at the utterance level, Chinese participants used indirectness significantly more frequently than Australian participants in refusals of requests. In addition, Chinese refusals were more indirect than Australian refusals at the discourse level. Chinese participants chose significantly more supportive moves than Australian participants and tended to put multiple supportive moves before the direct head act in refusals of either invitations or requests. The two groups also differed considerably in the content of refusal strategies. Moreover, both the EPQ and RVR data showed that Chinese were more sensitive to social status than Australians. The findings of this study were broadly consistent with studies on refusals in oral communication despite some differences.

A comparative study of self-praise on English and Chinese social media: strategies, themes, and motivations

“…English and Chinese are two languages that have been widely studied in pragmatics, mainly because of the large population of their users and the fascinating and different cultures that underlie their politeness (Leech, 2007). Numerous studies have explored and compared various speech acts, especially those related to Brown and Levinson's (1987) face theory such as gratitude, refusal, and requests, in English and Chinese (Zhu, 2017;Chang and Ren, 2020;House and Kádár, 2021;Li, 2022). However, the speech act of self-praise remains relatively understudied (Li and Wu, 2022;Xia and Jiang, 2022;Zhang and Aliya, 2022).…”