Abstract
The majority of pragmatics research on the speech act of refusals has employed production questionnaires or role-plays to elicit data. Research employing more naturalistic data is needed to explore the actual performance of refusals, particularly in those socially sensitive contexts such as date refusals and within a public domain such as the reality TV show. The present study investigates the under-researched topic of date refusals on reality TV shows in China. The corpus in the present study comprised 38 female date refusals collected from a popular Chinese TV dating programme over a year. It was found that when refusing a date invitation in the TV show, Chinese females employed a limited range of pragmatic strategies. Their date refusals were mostly realized by means of apologies, and reasons, and to a lesser degree through adjuncts to refusals (including positive comments and gratitude) and direct refusal strategies. In addition, the Chinese females demonstrated a preference for strategies of involvement politeness in their date refusals. The paper also discusses the possible impact of the genre of reality TV shows on the Chinese females date refusals.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 89-97 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Discourse, Context & Media |
| Volume | 13 Part B |
| Early online date | 4 Jun 2016 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2016 |
Keywords
- Date refusal
- Reality TV show
- Involvement
- Independence
- Refusal strategy
- Adjunct to refusal