國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
33
Chapter4 Data Analysis
In this chapter, we will first display the child’s refusal responses. Since the data were collected at six-month intervals, that is, at 2; 7, 3; 1 and 3; 7, we will discuss the child’s refusal responses at the three temporal points in Sections 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 respectively.
4.1 The child’s refusals at 2; 7
In order to explore the child’s utilization of refusal, we will first consider his performance of refusals. We examined the child’s refusal responses, and 52 refusal utterances were identified in his responses to his mother. Table 1 shows the refusal strategies at 2; 7.
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Table 1. The realization of the child’s refusals at 2; 7
Strategy Number of token Percentage (%)
Direct refusal 41 78.9
Unrelated answer 4 7.7
Insistence 4 7.7
Silence 3 5.8
Total 52 100.1
In Table 1, the column of strategy summarizes the refusal strategies the child adopted at 2; 7. The number of tokens and percentages are shown next to the strategies. Four strategies are used at 2; 7.
Direct refusal (78.9%): the child relied extensively on Direct refusal to refuse, which type of utterance occurred with the most frequency of all types at 2; 7. From the table, it is obvious that direct refusal occupied the most major percentage.
Example 1 illustrates how he refuses with a direct refusal.
Example 1
1.MOT: 你看 # 車車收進去好不好?
‘Look, pick up your toy cars, OK?’
2. CHI: 不要.
‘No.’
In Example 1, the mother asked the child to pick up his toy cars, and he refused with the strategy of direct refusal ‘No’. Based on the observations in previous studies (Liao, 1994; Guo, 2001; Yang, 2003; Yang, 2004), children seldom consider other’s
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
feelings and face, and thus adopt the most direct way to refuse. Guo (2001) claims that children’s prior consideration is to deliver their unwillingness in refusal and that they do not take the hearer’s face into account. The child’s extensive use of the strategy of direct refusal at 2; 7 reflects that he is still concerned with his own willingness first and so he chooses the most direct way to refuse. The linguistic form of direct refusal used by the child is 不要 buyao. Dunn (1991) classified refusal responses into two types of argument, namely self-oriented and other-oriented. First, other-oriented or conciliatory argument (see also Kruger, 1992) refers to those conversational turns in which the speaker takes account of the hearer’s needs and desires in an attempt to conciliate the hearer or to avoid possible conflict. The second category is self-oriented argument, in which the speaker’s own interest is explicitly expressed. It also includes reference to the speaker’s own desire, need, or emotional state. Based on Dunn’s classification, the linguistic form of 不要 buyao could be viewed as a self-oriented argument since it emphasizes the speaker’s own desire, yao
‘want’, and buyao directly denies the willingness of the child. It can be seen as further evidence that the child at 2; 7 still considered his own needs, desires, and interest firsts, which is reflected in his refusal strategy (direct refusal), and the use of the linguistic form of direct refusal buyao.
In addition to direct refusal, the child also adopted other strategies although they
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
occurred much less than direct refusal. They are Unrelated answer, Insistence, and Silence.
Unrelated answer (7.7%): the child refused by giving an unrelated answer to his mother’s request. Consider the following example.
Example 2
1.MOT: 你講一遍給媽媽聽?
‘You repeat what I just said?’
2.MOT: 媽咪講什麼?
‘What did Mommy just say?’
3.CHI: 講故事.
‘Tell a story.’
The scenario in Example 2 is that the mother had previously warned the child not to jump from the sofa or he would get hurt. She wanted him to repeat what she had just said to him, while he replied with an unrelated answer ‘tell a story.’ In Chen et al.’s study of adult refusal, giving an unrelated answer can be considered as being less skillful despite the fact that it may be thought of as indirect. In conversation, any act occurring immediately after an initiating speech act is viewed as a meaningful response. The avoidance of a direct positive response is interpreted as a refusal, and a refusal that evades the proposition of the initiating speech act can be perceived as not skillful (Chen et al, 1995).
Insistence (7.7%): the child insisted on his original plan of action as a strategy of refusal. In Example 3, he was requested to talk with his mother and he refused by
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
insisting on continuing to perform his previous activity—watching ‘Dare Topis’7. Insistence adds no new information to the interaction, and reflects a proactive tendency rather than a reactive one (Bales, 1990). As discussed previously, any act occurring after a speech act is viewed as a meaningful response. In Example 3, the child replied to his mother’s request by insisting on continuing in the performance of his original activity, which reply actively expressed his desire (proactive); however, the insistence can not be viewed as skillful since it did not respond to the proposition of his mother’s request (reactive).
Example 3
1.MOT: 你要跟姊姊玩或跟媽咪說話啊.
‘Do you want to play with your sister or talk with me?’
2.CHI: 看 dare topis.
‘Watch ‘Dare Topis.’
Silence (5.8%): When the child did not know how to refuse, he would remain silent or ignore the request. According to Chen et al. (1995), remaining silent could be viewed as not skillful as giving an unrelated answer when refusing since both of them did not provide a meaningful response to the context.
At 2; 7, the child often softened his refusals with some linguistic devices although it occurred less often (9.6%). He used discourse markers and changed the syntactic structure to soften the face-threatening power of his refusal. In Example 4,
7 ‘Dare Topis’ is the name of a TV program.
‧
he was playing with his mother. His mother offered him a book and he refused with a direct refusal ‘No’, which was modified by a discourse marker 啊.
The use of a discourse marker also occurred in another context. Consider Example 5.
‘What does the snake want to do?’
4.MOT: 蛇要咬你 # 咬你的鼻子.
‘The snake wants to bites your nose.’
*sit: Mommy pretends to bite the child.
5.CHI: 不要喔.
‘No.’
In Example 5, the child was playing with his mother. The mother pretended that there was a snake and that it would bite the child’s nose, and he replied with a direct refusal ‘No’ which was modified by the discourse marker 喔.
According to Guo (2001), discourse markers are used under two circumstances.
First, children may use a discourse marker to show friendliness and closeness. In Example 4, the mother had just offered the child a book and had then asked the child whether he wanted to buy it. The child had not been requested to take the book his
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
mother offered, and he adopted 啊 to show his friendliness instead of giving an absolute ‘No’, and thus softened the power of his refusal. Second, children may use a discourse marker to beg his/her interlocutor to give up doing something. In Example 5, the child didn’t want to be bitten by the snake. In addition to a direct ‘NO’ to the threat of being bitten, he also used a discourse marker 喔 to invoke the concession of his mother.
In addition to the use of discourse markers, the child also changed the syntactic structure of his refusal. Example 6 illustrates how the syntactic structure was changed to soften the power of the refusal.
Example 6
1.MOT: 我們來聽音樂喔.
‘Let’s listen to the music.’
2.CHI: 不要好不好?
‘I don’t want to, OK?’
In Example 6, the mother invited the child to listen to some music and he changed the syntactic structure declarative 不要 to the interrogative 不要好不好 to refuse. The change of syntactic structure was considered to be more polite in Wang’s discussion of adult refusal (1995) since the interrogative provides the hearer with a choice and thus decreases the face threatening power of the refusal.
Previous studies (Kuczynski and Kochanska, 1990; Eisenberg and Garvey, 1981;
Kucynski et al., 1987) have shown how mothers’ requests affect the way in which
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
children refuse. Children’s refusal may bring about conflict due to the difference between the mothers’ desire and children’s willingness. In the course of interacting with mothers, children often encounter situations in which they receive a request that they don’t want to comply with; and children’s refusals may cause mothers’
compensation of unsuccessful requests.
When facing children’s non-compliance, mothers may reformulate their requests, and thus, children need to accommodate their refusals to meet the immediate context.
Two recurring patterns were identified in the interactional sequence between the child and the mother. First, the data indicates that the mother’s response to the child’s frequent refusals at 2; 7 was to reformulate her requests. Based on Levin and Rubin’s study (1984), the reformulation of a request can be generally divided into three types, that is, aggravation, mitigation and explanation. Aggravation means that speaker intensifies the force of the request to reformulate a failed request. Mitigation means that speaker decreases the imposition and cost of the request to make up for an unsuccessful request. Explanation refers to reasons or justifications that the mother provides to create the grounds and support for an original request.
At this stage, the mother usually adopted aggravation as her dominant strategy to reformulate her failed request. She applied aggravation mainly via repetition of her original request. When the child faced the mother’s reformulated requests, he usually
‧
responded with the same strategy with his original refusals in a sequence. Example 7 shows how the child and his mother responded to each other in an interactional sequence.
Example 7
1.MOT: 你要跟姊姊玩或跟媽媽講話呀
‘Do you want to play with your sister or talk with me?’
2.CHI: 看 dare topis.
‘Watch ‘Dare Topis’
3.MOT: 你還是要看 dare topis 是不是.
‘You still want to watch ‘Dare Topis,’ right?’
4.CHI: 是.
In Example 7, at first, the mother used an imperative to ask the child to say something to her or to his sister (Line 1), while the child insisted on continuing in performing his original activity—watching ‘Dare Topis’ (Line 2). When faced with the child’s negative response, the mother made a repetition of her original request to ask the child to say something (Line 6). When facing mother’s request again, the child repeated his previous refusal strategy to respond—Insistence on performing his original activity (Line 7). In the above verbal exchanges, we are given a sequence like this.
‧
Figure 2 Sequences that involve reformulated request refusal responses (no account) From the figure, it is found that; first, repetition is the mother’s major reformulation strategy. Second, the child adopted the same refusal strategy when his first refusal failed. Many researchers have claimed that young children primarily use repetition to make a reformulation of a failed request. The same phenomenon was observed when the child refused again in the conversational sequence, that is, the child repeated the same strategy to reformulate his original refusal.
Apart from the pattern shown in Figure 2, Pattern 2 shows that the child’s refusal is also answered with the mother’s account. In other words, after the child directly expressed his non-compliance, the mother often gave some explanation to account for her previous request. Consider the following example.
Example 8
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
3.CHI: 不要.
‘No.’
4.MOT: 可是你的車車不是圈圈啦.
‘But your cars aren’t in order.’
5.MOT: 要不要把車車收進去?
‘Do you want to pick up the cars?’
6.CHI: 不要.
‘NO.’
At first, the mother requested that the child put his toy cars which were randomly scattered on the ground away (Line 2). However, the child replied with a direct refusal
‘NO’ (Line 3). After failing in achieving her goal, the mother provided the supporting argument of the reason why the child needed to put the toy cars back—the cars were not in order (Line 4). And the mother requested the child to put toy cars again (Line 5).
Here, the mother repeated her original request. In Example 8, the mother used an interrogative in her request (Line 2 and Line 5). The illocutionary force of the request was explicitly expressed in the mother’s volume and pitch (louder and higher). In addition, the application of an account failed to invoke the child’s compliance. He still refused with a direct refusal. The sequence in the example is given below.
‧
Figure3. Sequences that involve request reformulation and refusal responses (account) From the figure above, it is found that the child at 2; 7 relied on repeating the same strategy when his mother came up with the account to reformulate her request.
Foster (1999) found that when the communication failed, children used three options.
They would repeat the communication verbatim, make a new attempt to convey the same information, or give up. At 2; 7, it is obvious that the child relied on repetition in order to reiterate his refusals. In addition, the mother reformulated her request in the same way. Repetition is the main device used by the child to refuse again and is also used by the mother to reformulate her request.
The child at 2; 7 adopted direct refusal and prioritized his willingness when making refusals. Occasionally, he would refuse indirectly with other strategies. These strategies showed an evasion of a response to the proposition of mother’s requests and
M: Request
C: refusal (Strategy X)
M: account
M: aggravation (Repetition)
C: refusal (Strategy X)
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
are thus perceived as impolite. The child’s refusal strategies at 2; 7 were direct and impolite from a conversational perspective.