Taiwanese Politeness Phenomenon of Junior High Boys in Tainan, 2000s

Abstract

This is a cultural pragmatic study on the refusal strategy of Taiwanese teenage boy students. Based on the researches of Gu (1990) and Liao and Bresnahan (1996) on politeness, the present study invites high school boy students in Tainan as the participants to look into their politeness in refusal. Three scenarios of requests are the medium that this paper applies to analyze what teenagers say when they would rather refuse. By observing junior high boy students' refusal strategies in qualitative and quantitative analysis, we discover that there is a new trend of politeness; people's linguistic utterances in refusal have somehow changed during the decades. Our three main findings are: (1). A high percentage (54.05%) application of the address form indicates that the address form remains as the symbol of respectfulness. (2). Interestingly, 39.29% of the subjects utter ke3yi3ma/ke3bu4ke3yi3 'Can Ⅰ' and 17.86% of bai4tuo1 'please' to show respect to the ones of high status inside their family, especially to their parents. (3). Taiwanese, thought to be collectivism-oriented, has the tendency to build up their own individualism in the new millennium. In a word, though the Taiwanese teenagers express their true feelings with a direct refusal strategy, we can see that the respect to the ones of high-status still remains its significant value in Taiwanese society.