POLITENESS STRATEGIES OF REFUSALS TO HIGHER STATUS INTERLOCUTORS BY ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN SPEAKERS
Abstract
Cross-cultural refusal studies focus on how two different cultures perform refusal differently. This study sets out to investigate the speech acts of refusal performed by English and indonesian speakers. In particular, it attempts to identify and classify the politeness strategies used to express refusals. The data used in this research were utterances containing refusals defined by the politeness strategies proposed by brown and levinson (1987). The data were gathered using the discourse completion task, which consists of two situations (+P -D and +P +D) completed by 30 English speaking students and 30 Indonesian speaking students. The collected data include 120 refusal utterances comprising: 60 utterances in english and 60 utterances in Indonesian. Out of the 60 english refusals, 26 (43.3%) refusals were expressed using positive politeness strategy, and 1 (1.6%) were expressed using off-record strategy, the least used politeness strategy. Negative politeness strategy is the most used strategy in Indonesian with 33 (55%) tokens, meanwhile bald on record is the least used strategy in giving refusal in indonesian with 0 (0%) tokens.
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