PRAGMATIC TRANSFER: A STUDY OF REFUSAL STRATEGIES AMONG CHINESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Abstract

The present study aims at exploring how negative pragmatic transfer has affected Chinese learners of English in terms of the completion of cross-cultural refusals and the correlation between their linguistic proficiency and pragmatic competence. The empirical data were collected through an elicitation instrument, i.e., a free discourse completion tasks questionnaire, developed by Zhu (2012). A total of 117 informants participated in the research, including 39 Chinese learners of English at the advanced level, 36 Chinese learners of English at the intermediate level, and 42 native Chinese speakers. Besides, due to the lack of access to native English speakers, the data for native English speakers were quoted from Zhu (2012). The refusal responses by each group were analyzed and compared on the basis of the type, frequency, and content of the refusal semantic formula originally proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). The findings showed that Chinese learners of English were under the influence of the L1 convention in that they used more refusals strategies involving mitigation and regret but expressed less gratitude than did the American counterparts. Furthermore, Chinese learners of English tended to offer specific excuses, while Americans preferred vague ones. Regarding the correlation of language proficiency and pragmatic transfer, the results revealed a great deal of complexity. The advanced learners showed larger amounts of pragmatic transfer than the intermediate learners when the utilization of a strategy was highly dependent on language proficiency. However, in other cases, the intermediate learners transferred more L1 norms in making L2 refusals.