The refusal of request speech act in Persian, English, and Balouchi languages: A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study

Abstract

The study examined the realization of refusal of request speech act in Persian, English, and Balouchi languages. 219 individuals participated in the study. Discourse completion task was employed to elicit the participants’ refusals. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square were used to analyze the data. The findings revealed the existence of statistically significant differences among the three groups of speakers concerning both the total frequencies and the frequencies of direct, indirect, and adjuncts to refusals strategies. Furthermore, concerning social status, no statistically significant differences were detected either for total number of strategies or for the number of strategies in main categories in each language, except for the indirect strategies among Persian speakers. In Persian language, with the increase in the interlocutors’ social status level, the increase in the number of indirect strategies was discerned. Likewise, the frequency differences of some semantic formulas were statistically significant regarding the social status in each language.

The Realisation of the Refusal Speech Act in Tanjung Tanah Dialect of Kerinci

“…Tanah dialect of Kerinci address the [Positive Opinion] as in 'R17L-30.2 ilaok lao tapi' (It's good, but…), the statement of [Empathy] as in 'R03E-53 Dək apao lah...' (It's okay), [Pause Fillers] as in 'R01E-61 Eh:'. These three adjuncts are similar with the original and the modified version of the semantic formulas of the refusal strategies in the works of Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz (1990), Kwon (2004), andMoafian et al, (2019). Beside this, [Solidarity References] is the last adjunct revealed in the role-plays.…”

“…Nonetheless, most of the previous studies tended to look at the realisation of the refusal strategies from the perspective of cross cultural pragmatics. For examples, Nassar et al (2020), Al-Shboul & Maros (2020), Moafian, Yazdi, & Sarani (2019) and Wijayanto (2019). Meanwhile, other studies focused on how the language learners performed the refusal strategies in the target languages such as Hashemian (2021), Nurjaleka (2020) and Hariri & Moini (2020).…”

An investigation of cross-cultural gender-wise stereotypes in apologizing through film series

“…This can be justified by the widespread use of technology such as the Internet across the world. This piece of technology helps people interact from different cultural backgrounds; as a result, certain similarities are observed in people's international interactions [ 81 ].…”

The Art of Saying “No” to University Students: A Pragmatic Analysis of the Speech Act of Refusal in Teacher-Student Role-Plays

“…The results showed clear cross-cultural variations in the frequency and content of semantic formulas used by each language group in relation to a number of contextual variables, including social distance and dominance, and the eliciting speech acts, which included requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. Another example of cross-cultural studies is Moafian, Yazdi, and Sarani (2019) who examined the realization of the refusal speech act in the Persian, English, and Balouchi languages. Comparisons of the refusal realization strategies revealed statistically significant differences among the three groups of speakers concerning both the total frequencies and the frequencies of direct/indirect refusal strategies and adjuncts.…”

“…Second, the current study focuses on the realization of the speech act of refusal within an institutionalized academic setting. Earlier studies on the speech act of refusal have generally addressed crosscultural comparisons (e.g., El-Dakhs, 2018;Moafian, Yazdi, & Sarani, 2019) or interlanguage pragmatics (e.g., Morkus, 2018;Shishavan & Sharifian, 2016). The current study, however, will examine how the realization of this speech act may be different in institutionalized discourse.…”