Refusal and Politeness Strategies in Relation to Social Status: A Case of Face-threatening Act among Indonesian University Students

Abstract

—The present study aimed at investigating how Indonesian students refuse offers, invitations, and suggestions to persons having different social statuses. Refusal and politeness strategies were the focus of this study. The social variable involved in this study was the social status represented in lower to higher social-status (LHSS), higher to lower social-status (HLSS), and equal social-status (ESS) relationships. The data were obtained through discourse completion test (DCT) distributed to 161 students. The DCTs resulted in 2898 corpus data. Data analysis suggested that in general, the refusal strategy across social-status relationships and across initiating acts is consistently patterned, i.e. indirect strategy was more dominantly performed by the research participants. Criticizing, presenting other agenda, showing a preference, and stating self-limitation were the semantic formulas that were frequently used for refusing indirectly. Turning to politeness strategy, LHSS group used the highest number of redressive expressions, followed by HLSS and ESS groups. The politeness strategies occurring in the three groups were the use of redressive expressions and the use of wordy refusals. This study proved that social-status does not influence much to the choice of refusal strategy, but it contributes to the choice of politeness strategies.