A Comparative Study of Japanese Refusal Expressions Used by Indonesian and Native Japanese Female University Students

The objectives of this research are to analyze what refusal strategies performed by male and female employees of BCD Travel Indonesia and to identify the language features found in refusal strategies of male and female employees. The qualitative method, specifically using a case study is used in this research. The primary data source of this study was taken from a written document namely Discourse Completion Test (DCT) proposed by Beebe and friends (1990) with little modification. Questionnaires to collect the data, specifically the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as the instrument are applied in this research. The findings show that from 132 utterances of male employees, 80 utterances are indirect strategy, 28 utterances are adjuncts, and 24 utterances are direct strategy. These results show that male and female employees have their own ways of delivering indirect refusal strategy. In the utterances of male and female employee’s refusal strategies, 5 of 10 language features, such as lexical hedges or fillers, intensifiers, ‘superpolite’ forms, avoidance of strong swear words and emphatic stress are investigated.
 
 Keywords : Refusal strategies, language features, male and female employees

In this study, 30 male and 30 female Indonesian intermediate EFL learners were investigated to find out the gender differences in performing refusal strategy and the effect of interlocutor status on refusal strategy performed by the selected participants. A qualitative approach was employed in this study by using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with 12 scenarios. The data were analyzed into the refusal taxonomy proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). The results showed that the indirect strategy become the most frequently used strategy performed by male and female students. However, the female students have used a variety of indirect strategies slightly greater than did the male students. Moreover, the interlocutor status also affected a similar effect on the refusal strategy performed by the participants. Therefore, there is no significant difference in refusals between male and female students, and the results reveal that EFL students prefer to refuse respectfully to avoid offending others. The researchers proposed that future studies use not only DCT but also other instruments in collecting data in order to acquire complete data to explore pragmatic competency.

The present study aimed at investigating how Indonesian students refuse offers, invitations, and suggestions to persons having different social statuses. Refusal and politeness strategies were the focus of this study. The social variable involved in this study was the social status represented in lower to higher social-status (LHSS), higher to lower social-status (HLSS), and equal social-status (ESS) relationships. The data were obtained through discourse completion test (DCT) distributed to 161 students. The DCTs resulted in 2898 corpus data. Data analysis suggested that in general, the refusal strategy across social-status relationships and across initiating acts is consistently patterned, i.e. indirect strategy was more dominantly performed by the research participants. Criticizing, presenting other agenda, showing a preference, and stating self-limitation were the semantic formulas that were frequently used for refusing indirectly. Turning to politeness strategy, LHSS group used the highest number of redressive expressions, followed by HLSS and ESS groups. The politeness strategies occurring in the three groups were the use of redressive expressions and the use of wordy refusals. This study proved that social-status does not influence much to the choice of refusal strategy, but it contributes to the choice of politeness strategies.

The speech act of refusal is an area that has been considered by a variety of researchers. However, to date a specific comparison of native speakers of British English (NS) with nonnative (NNS) Saudi speakers has not been undertaken. This study fills this gap by exploring the similarities and differences in the refusal strategies of British English (NS) and (NNS) Saudis studying in the United Kingdom (UK). For the study, 33 subjects were asked to respond to 10 different scenarios, where they were required to carry out the speech act of refusal, allowing for data collection through a Discourse Completion Test. The resultant data was analysed in terms of semantic formulas and categorised according to the Beebe et al’s (1990) refusal taxonomy. The results suggested differences between the two groups in refusal performance. Regret or saying “sorry”, accompanied by excuses and explanations were the preferred formula for refusal in both groups, although direct refusal strategies were also relied on by the two groups. This suggests a basis for the application of Brown and Levinson’s, (1987), politeness model in terms of universality. The choice of direct refusals for the NNS Saudi’s also suggests the influence of British culture in respondents’ realizations of refusals in English. From the research, it is suggested that refusal strategies and patterns are greatly influenced by native language and that the amount of time spent by NNS Saudis in the UK has an impact on their refusal strategies. The impact of this is that in order for NNS to develop appropriate pragmatic ability there is a need to recognize the influence of native language on refusal strategies in a second language as well as the experience of speaking with NS speakers. Further work is thus needed to understand the levels of impact of these two areas.

Refusal refers to a face-threatening act (FTA) for it can risk one’s face in communication. It encompasses turning down someone’s request, offer or suggestion. The speech act of refusal has been one of the most prominent areas of interest for many scholars. However, there is a dearth of such study in Malaysia, particularly within the Malay community. Aimed to fill the gap, this study examined the refusal strategies used in English by Malay ESL undergraduates, observe the differences and similarities in the refusal strategies of male and female undergraduates, and analyse whether relative power has an influence on the choice of their refusal strategies. This study employed the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) which was distributed among sixty Malay ESL undergraduates, consisting of 30 males and 30 females where they were required to refuse requests from three addressees (lecturer, friend, junior) in five different situations. The collected data were then analysed quantitatively. The findings showed that 32 out of 41 types of refusal strategies were used by the participants. Both male and female students employed more indirect refusal strategies regardless of the person’s relative power. Furthermore, relative power did influence the participants' choices in refusal strategies.

Refusal is not simple to be taught to language learners. It is challenging act due to its intrinsically face threatening nature. This study is aimed at finding out the realization of refusal strategies in five different channels of political interviews used by Donald Trump--The President of United States of America. The method of collecting data is documentation. The researcher uses descriptive qualitative in analyzing the data. The results show that there are direct and indirect refusal strategies used by President Trump in five different channels of political interviews. In direct strategy, there are ‘no’ and negative willingness. Moreover, in indirect strategy, there are excuse reason and explanation, promise for future acceptance, statement of principle, threat or negative consequences, criticizing or statement of negative feeling or opinion, and verbal avoidance. Further, there are the similarities and differences of refusal strategies used by President Trump among the five different channels of political interviews. The similarities are shown in the interview with CNN; he is more indirect to refuse the interviewers’ want. It is similar to the interview with FOX and CBS News that he is more indirect too. In addition, the differences are shown that in the interview with CNN, FOX, and CBS News, he uses more indirect refusal strategies. In contrast, in ABC and CNBC News, he uses more direct refusal strategies. In term of social status, he uses more of indirect refusal strategies to the interviewers who have lower social status. It means that he wants to soften the offending of interlocutor’s face in refusals. This study also gives pedagogical implication for the language learners to improve their pragmatic competence especially in refusal speech act. Thus, they can use refusals appropriately for communication.

The aim is to investigate refusal strategies used by English and Serbian native speakers in terms of two sociological variables: social distance and power. To this end, the participants of the conducted experiment completed a written Discourse Completion Test which introduced 12 everyday situations to which they were expected to respond by making refusals to requests. The obtained data were categorised and analysed statistically. Overall, the results indicated both similarities and differences between the two groups. Both groups reported significantly more indirect refusal strategies than direct ones – the most common ones being excuse and statement of regret. There were, however, some differences between the groups in the frequency of particular refusal strategies such as adjuncts, which were employed more frequently by the English participants. Furthermore, unlike their counterparts, the Serbian participants were shown to be sensitive to the power variable, reflected in the significantly higher percentage of direct refusals used when addressing a subordinate interlocutor than when addressing an interlocutor of equal or higher power. The obtained results not only describe the similarities and differences between refusal strategies in English and Serbian, but also highlight different properties of the two cultures reflected in the use of these strategies.

Introduction: Effective communication often involves expressing disagreement while maintaining social harmony, which is influenced by cultural and linguistic norms. Native speakers of English typically employ various politeness strategies in their disagreement speech acts. However, Iraqi EFL learners may navigate these strategies differently due to variations in cultural norms and language proficiency. Therefore, the current study aimed to contrastively analyze the way Iraqi EFL learners and native English speakers perform the speech act of disagreement in light of politeness. Methodology: In this regard, a discourse completion test (DCT) was administered to 66 participants, comprising 33 Iraqi EFL students studying English as a foreign language (TEFL) and 33 native English speakers. The DCT was made up of scenarios that mirrored real-life circumstances in order to provoke responses from people who disagreed with them. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness was employed to analyze participants’ utterances. Results: The findings indicated that while expressing disagreement with people of higher, participants in both groups were more concerned with keeping their interlocutors’ positive faces. Furthermore, the study findings indicated that despite differences in the two groups of participants, Iraqi EFL learners utilized positive indirect politeness strategies more frequently than English native speakers. On the other hand, English native speakers applied direct and negative politeness strategies. Conclusion: Generally, the findings indicated that both groups tended to use the most direct type of disagreement as the social distance and power relation decreased.

To achieve one of the major objectives of modern foreign language teaching – enabling learners to communicate functionally in the target language – we usually need an ongoing evaluation of our learners' familiarity with different types of speech acts. Based on such an assumption, this study attempted to investigate Iranian EFL learners' perception and production of politeness in three basic speech acts: request, refusal, and apology. The participants involved 63 MA ELT students. A multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and a politeness rating questionnaire were used to generate participant's data. Selection of situations in DCT was based on three social factors of relative power, social distance, and gender. The emerging data was analyzed mainly based on Blum-Kulka et al.'s Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) and by using descriptive statistics. The data analysis revealed that the participants had enough knowledge about speech act and politeness strategies. In requesting, they mainly relied on indirect strategies; similarly, in refusing, they had a tendency towards using indirect strategies more than direct ones; but in apologizing they acted more directly. Gender as a cultural variable had effect on face saving strategies, and based on Brown & Levinson's politeness theory, Iranian EFL learners in this study mainly resorted to negative politeness.

For the purpose of achieving a successful communication, issues such as the appropriateness of speech acts and face saving become essential. Therefore, it is very important to achieve a high level of pragmatic competence in speech acts. Bearing this in mind, this study was conducted to investigate the preferred refusal strategies Kurdish and Syriac native speakers use when faced with offers and requests from equal status interlocutors. The current study has used a modified Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) consisting of six situations (three of which elicit refusals to offerings and the other three to requests). Forty subjects participated in this study: 20 native speakers of the Kurdish language (10 male and 10 female students) and 20 native speakers of Syriac language (10 male and 10 female students). All participants are currently pre-graduate students attending Zakho University. The participants were asked to provide written data that express their refusals to these situations. The data collected have then been analyzed descriptively according to frequency and number of occurrences of semantic formulas used by Beebe et al (1990). The results showed that a) the Syriac Native Participants (SNP)s frequently preferred indirect and adjunct strategies for refusals rather than direct ones, b) the Kurdish Native Participants (KNP)s often preferred direct and indirect strategies more than adjunct ones, c) the results also revealed that gender has a great influence on the use of refusal strategies in various ways. Finally, this study concludes that both KNPs and SNPs tended to use more strategies when refusing requests than offers whereas gender has shown to play a significant role in the choice and number of the refusal strategies used by both groups of participants.

This research aims to find out the most frequent strategies used by Indonesian female university students in expressing their refusal to sexual intercourse and the refusal strategies that they used to refuse the sexual intercourse. This research was carried out in 14 cities in Indonesia with 638 respondents (307 female respondents and 331 male respondents). The data were collected by using Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and interview to identify the sexual refusal strategies by female university students. The data were analyzed by using reconstructed conversation and Speech Act theory by Searle (1976) and Politeness of Brown & Levinson (1989) as a supporting theory. This research finds seven frequent strategies used by Indonesian female university students to refuse the sexual intercourse. The first is pregnancy risk reason (37,07%), next is legality reason (21,59%), postponement (15,48%) is at the third place, direct refusal non-performative (14,05 %) as the forth and is followed by religiouos reason (7,94%) at the fifth, direct refusal performative (2,24%) is the sixth and the last strategy is topic switch (1,63%). The data also show that most of Indonesian female university students refuse the sexual intercourse by giving pregnancy risk reason such as fear of being pregnant. From the reconstructed conversation, the data analysis show that most of them use Indirect Speech Act to maintain the relationship, the politeness and the positive face want of their boyfriend.

This study investigated both Chinese and American refusal speech act from the perspectives of cross-cultural communication using a modified version of the discourse completion test (DCT) developed by Beebe et al. (1990).60 US college students and teachers and 60 Chinese college students and teachers are interviewed.The findings indicate that there are more similarities than differences among the Chinese and Americans in making refusals.Both groups preferred to use indirect refusal strategies rather than direct ones and preferred the strategies of reason, statement of alternative and regret.However, the American groups utilized a greater proportion of direct strategies than did the Chinese subjects on average.The differences can be attributed to cultural differences between Chinese and American Culture.

The current study seeks to probe the use of refusal strategies and their frequency among Saudi EFL students of Bachelor of Science (BS) at Moon University (pseudonym), Saudi Arabia. Through a convenient sampling procedure, 20 students were selected, and Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was administered. This test comprised 12 situations eliciting refusals to suggestions, requests, offers, and invitations. Their answers were then coded using the refusal strategies categories laid down by Beebe, Takahashi & Uliss-Weltz (1990) and were analyzed via content analysis. Each participant’s refusal strategy for each speech act was analyzed using descriptive statistics, to discover exact frequency counts. The results indicated that the indirect refusal strategies were adopted by Saudi EFL students with greater frequency than the direct strategies even though Saudi culture is characteristically inclined towards directness resulting in numerous face-threatening acts. The results demonstrated the tendency towards the use of adjuncts by EFL students which to some extent indicated the cultural grooming of interlocutors. Moreover, lack of pragma-linguistic competence was reflected in flawed and ambiguous syntactic structures which impacted the clarity of meaning. The findings also suggested that in this globalized world where cross-cultural communication is unavoidable, the teaching of English should be geared towards the development of both pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic competence among EFL students.

This study aims to investigate refusal strategies used among Jordanian Arabic speakers and EFL learners of English in Jordan. Two Discourse Completion Tests (DCT), containing scenarios of refusal, were completed by 43 Jordanian Arabic speakers along with 37 EFL learners of English in Jordan. Data analysis reveals three main refusal categories used in the data: direct, indirect and adjuncts to refusals. Jordanian Arabic speakers used 7% direct refusals, 57% indirect refusals, and 36% adjuncts to refusals. In contrast, EFL learners used 13% direct refusals, 62% indirect refusals, and 25% adjuncts to refusals. Additionally, strategies such as insisting, insulting, praising the other, and invoking the name of God were observed. In conclusion, both groups preferred indirect refusal strategies over other types. It was also noted that EFL learners used more direct and indirect refusal strategies than Jordanian Arabic speakers but fewer adjuncts to refusals. Both groups produced similar strategies in response to the four types of situations, indicating that cultural background significantly influenced the way refusals were performed, despite the different languages used.

One of the major aims in the modern teaching of foreign language is to enable the learners to communicate appropriately in target language. Pragmatic competence is a need for everyone to communicate appropriately. Speech acts are one of the most important elements of pragmatic competence. In this respect, the main aim of this study was to investigate Iranian English language teachers' familiarity with language functions in four of basic and important face threatening speech acts: Request, Refusal, apology, Greeting. The participants involved 30 English language teachers that comprised of 15 males and 15 females. A Written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and multiple choice discourse completion questionnaires (MDCT) were used to generate participant's data. Selection of situations in WDCT was based on three social factors of relative power, social distance, and gender. The emerging data was analyzed mainly based on Blum-Kulka et al.'s Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) and by using descriptive statistics. The data analysis revealed that the participants had enough knowledge about speech act and politeness strategies. In requesting, they mainly relied on indirect strategies; similarly, in refusing, they had a tendency towards using indirect strategies more than direct ones; in apologizing they acted more directly and in greeting they used verbal behaviors and hello expression more than hi expression and non-verbal behavior in formal situations. Based on Brown & Levinson's politeness theory, Iranian EFL Teachers in this study mainly resorted to negative politeness strategies.