A Corpus-Driven Study of Chinese Children’s Multimodal Refusal and Its Implications for Home Education

Abstract

Multimodal refusal is a common type of multimodal communicative act. Driven by naturally occurred corpus, this paper first classifies the parental acts that usually trigger children's refusal into three types: positive parenting, negative parenting and non-parenting acts. Then the paper thoroughly analyzes the multimodal representational characteristics of Chinese-speaking children's refusal and classifies their multimodal refusal acts according to the modal involvement on the one hand and the semantic degree of refusal on the other hand. They are verbal-dominant refusal, nonverbal-dominant refusal and verbal-nonverbal consistent refusal according to modal involvement and complete refusal and partial refusal according to degree of refusal. Finally, the paper summarizes three pieces of suggestions for parents in home education, including emphasizing the multimodal nature of children's refusal, adjusting parenting acts that may trigger children's refusal and cultivating children's ability of multimodal refusal.