An Interlanguage Pragmatic Study Of Refusals–Japanese Learners of Chinese

• Main Authors: OSAKI YUKIKO, 大崎由紀子
• Other Authors: 曾金金老師
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/11049042744126959379

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學研究所 === 99 === When native Japanese speakers communicate with Chinese native speakers, what is the main obstacle causing misunderstandings between them? Even the intermediate or advanced level Chinese learners would often have hard time expressing their real intentions or misunderstand interlocutors’ real intentions. The reasons causing such embarrassment not only arise from Chinese learners’ mispronunciation or word choices, more often, it is due to not be able to grasp the form and meaning of speech acts. Especially when native speakers use indirect speech acts which makes it even harder to understand what the interlocutors’ real intention. According to Chen, Ye & Zhang (1995), refusals are defined as a speech act which speakers deny to obey the actions demanded by the interlocutor. Beebe at al. (1990) divides refusals into four categories in terms of situations: invitation, request, offer and suggestion. The participants of this research are Japanese learners of Chinese, Chinese native speakers and Japanese native speakers. Through analyzing speech acts among the three groups, we want to identify the characteristics held in the interlanguage. We use Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to elicit refusals. Result of the study indicates it is more difficult to refuse teachers’ requests than to refuse the classmates’, and when it comes to the speech formulas, many of the participants use direct performance due to their lack of sufficient capability of commending the correct forms of polite sentences. Furthermore, according to the questionnaire conducted in this research, many Japanese learners of Chinese say it is most difficult to refuse requests and offers from the interlocutors, and so we found the existence of pragmatic transfer in interlanguage of Japanese learners. Although pragmatic transfer was found in advanced level learners, after referring current Chinese textbooks, we found that throughout all the contents there is no such a unit teaching Chinese learners how to react adequately when they encounter people with different social status. Through this research, I hope it can make a contribution to Japanese learners of Chinese acquiring Chinese refusals.