Abstract
He article explores the speech act of refusal in British English and Russian and investigates British and Russian refusal strategies from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The study aims to find similarities and differences between the ways of refusing requests, offers and invitations in different social contexts in two languages and cultures. It was conducted with the implementation of Speech Act Theo-ry (Austin 1962, Searle 1969, Searle & Vandervken 1985), Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson 1987, Leech 1983, 2014, Larina and Leech 2014, Watts 2003), and the Theory of Cultural Scripts (Wierzbicka 1991/2003). The modified version of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) developed by Beebe et al. (1990) was used for data collection. The study has revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in refusal strategies which exist due to cultural differences, culture-specific politeness strategies and Communicative Styles (Larina 2015, Larina, Mustajoki, Protassova 2017). It has found that the Russians use more direct strategies than the British and are more taciturn and laconic. The British do more face-work to mitigate their refusal, they use both negative and positive strategies with higher regularity and are more voluble. The knowledge of communicative differences in refusal as well as in other speech acts is necessary for the acquisition and development of pragmatic competence of L2 English learners and successful intercul-tural communication.
Highlights
Scholars around the world have devoted their research on different areas of pragmatics with the main goal of better understanding how languages are used
The study has shown that in both languages refusal is a complex of acts which usually involves apology, regret and explanation
Russians tend to say a straight No followed by gratitude, apology or explanation
Summary
Scholars around the world have devoted their research on different areas of pragmatics with the main goal of better understanding how languages are used. Comparing American English, Hebrew and Japanese Anna Wierzbicka (2003) points out significant differences on how refusal is performed in these languages. She notes that it is not common in English to express refusal by saying ‘No’ as one does in Hebrew, or to say ‘No’ in response to a request for information (e.g., in shops, hotels, and restaurants): ‘Do you have such and such?'. The speech act of refusal has attracted a lot of attention of researchers in different fields It has been studied in the framework of pragmatics in different languages and cultures (English, Japanese, Arabic, Persian and others) in comparative perspective [AlKhatani 2005, Ghazanfari, Bonyadi & Malekzadeh 2003, Houck & Gass 1999, Martínez-. The paper will focus on refusals to offers, requests and invitations in different social contexts
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