Chapter 4 Data Analysis
4.4 Children’s refusal sequence
4.4 Children’s refusal sequence
When one makes a refusal, several situations will occur. One is that the refusal is immediately perceived and accepted by the interlocutor. The interlocutor then gives up their request. Another is that the interlocutor does not accept the refusal and once more reformulates or justifies their request. The refuser may either accept the request or refuse again. Most of the refusals in our data were accepted immediately by the interlocutors. However, there are still situations that interlocutors did not drop their request. They tried to convince the refuser by giving further explanation. Example 21 illustrates this kind of situation.
Example 21
‘He can do the homework very fast.’
5. NIN: 喔好阿.
‘Oh, OK.’
JUN and NIN were role-playing. JUN asked NIN to play the role of older brother.
NIN first refused the request by using simple negation. Although the simple negation is quite direct, the force is slightly mitigated by adding the sentence final particle la.
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JUN received the refusal clearly; however, he did not want to give up his request. He further explained the advantage of playing the role of the older brother and intended to convince NIN to accept the request. He explained that the older brother is very strong in doing homework. He can write his homework very fast. NIN then accepted the request happily after realizing the advantages of playing the role. In this example, the interlocutor convinced the refuser successfully and the possible conflict is solved in only three turns.
Sometimes, a successful refuse takes more efforts. In example 22 JUN refused three times in order to achieve what he wanted.
Example 22
‘Let’s tidy up both sides together.’
4. CAI: 不要你收那邊.
‘No. You tidy up (the blocks) over there.’
5. CAI: 你收比較少耶我收比較多.
‘You tidied up less blocks. I tidied up more.’
6. JUN: 唉呦.
‘Aiyo.’
7. JUN: 我這樣都累死了. Reason
‘I am already exhausted (tiding up these blocks).’
8. JUN: 那都丟到你那邊給你收 Alternative
‘Then I will throw (the blocks) to your side for you to tidy up.’
9. CAI: 唉呦.
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In example 22 the two children were tiding up the blocks they just played. There were several piles of blocks all over the room. JUN was tiding up one of the piles.
CAI asked JUN to tidy up the piles away from them and CAI will do the other piles near them. The piles of blocks away from them were larger than the ones near them.
Therefore, JUN refused to follow the request by providing an alternative that they can tidy up all the piles together. Facing JUN’s refusal, CAI quickly refused his suggestion with a direct refusal and repeated the original request again. In addition, he tried to justify his request by mentioning that he has tidied up more blocks than JUN did.
After hearing CAI’s request and his justification, JUN realized that the force of request has increased. Wu (2010) found that when the power and the complexity of request are increased, children are more likely to use combined refusal strategies. The similar phenomenon is found in our example where JUN applied the combination of refusal strategies to reinforce his unwillingness. He first gave the reason ‘he is already
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exhausted tiding up the blocks’ to respond CAI’s claim that JUN tidied up less blocks.
And then he provided another alternative that he will throw all the blocks to the place CAI wanted to clean up. From this refusal, we can discover that JUN is getting tougher on his refusal since the second alternative he proposed is actually concerned more for his own interest than the first alternative. He showed his unwillingness clearly in an indirect but tough way.
Noticing the strong unwillingness of JUN, CAI decided to change his request. He asked JUN to tidy up the piles away from them. JUN refused to accept the request again even when CAI revised the request to meet JUN’s interest. He did not want to tidy up the blocks anymore. Therefore, he used a reason that ‘he has tidied up the blocks for too long’ to refuse the request. After three times of refusal, CAI finally abandoned his request and told JUN that he would tidy up the large blocks by himself.
We can see that children at this stage are capable of using skillful strategies to negotiate with their peers and achieve what they desire.
The previous example showed that children kept reformulating their request when receiving a refusal. The refuser also changed their refusals when the request is reformulated. The child provided different reasons or added other strategies to respond to the requests. However, children did not always use such skillful strategies to negotiate with their peers. There are also conversations which the children simply
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repeated their requests and refusals again and again, as shown in example 23.
Example 23
1. NIN: 給我.
‘Give it to me.’
2. JUN: 唉呦你已經第二次了. Reason
‘Aiyo, you have played the second time.’
3. NIN: 這是我先拿到的.
‘This is gotten by me first.’
4. NIN: 給我.
‘Give it to me.’
5. JUN: /ei/你已經第二次了喔. Reason
‘You have played the second time.’
6. NIN: 這我拿到的.
NIN and JUN both wanted to get the toy car in example 23. JUN was holding the toy car and NIN asked JUN to give it to him. JUN refused the request by giving a reason that ‘you have played with it twice.’ The reason indicated that because NIN had request the third time, JUN changed his refusal by giving another reason that ‘the toy
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car is not bought by you,’ implying that everyone has the right to play with it since the toy car did not belong to anyone. Facing the new refusal, NIN stuck to his old justification and repeated it once more. From this conversation, we discover that children did not always use skillful and various strategies to negotiate with others as in example 21; they sometimes relied on repetition and insistence of their original refusals or requests. This kind of sequence is considered to be less mature since little information is added and the conversation is not going further. Therefore, the conflict is less likely to be settled down and the agreement is hard to be reached.
In the previous analysis, we found that children used more indirect refusal strategies than direct strategies, which indicates that they tried to mitigate the threat to the interlocutors’ face. They seemed to value their friendships and strived to maintain them. From example 24 we can see how they tried to use the concept of friendship to convince the interlocutor to accept the request.
Example 24
1. ZHI: 我們把兩台法拉利都用在一起好不好.
‘Let’s connect the two Ferraris together, OK?’
2. CAI: 不要啦.
‘No.’
3. ZHI: 喂不然我不要跟你玩喔.
‘Hey, otherwise I won’t play with you.’
4. CAI: 不要.
‘No.’
5. ZHI: 我不跟你玩喔.
‘Then I won’t play with you.’
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In example 24 ZHI proposed to connect the Ferraris they have made. CAI refused her request with a simple negation. ZHI then used their friendship as a threat to force CAI to accept the request by saying ‘otherwise I won’t play with you.’ CAI still insisted not to follow the request by repeating his simple negation ‘no.’ ZHI once more repeat that she won’t play with CAI if he did not accept the request. This kind of threat is used quite often in children’s conversation. Children bear the concept of friendship in
mind and use it as a threat when they want to achieve their goals. Utterances such as
‘otherwise I won’t play with you’ or ‘I won’t be you friend’ appeared in our data as a
way of persuading or even forcing others to accept what the speaker wants. Most of the time, when children appealed to the friendship between them and their interlocutors, they achieved their goals successfully.
Finally, certain refusal sequence appeared frequently in the situation which boys refused girls. As we mentioned in the previous section that boys tend to used more avoidance as their refusals, the refusal sequences in cross-gender situation often ended with a nonverbal avoidance, as example 25 shown.
Example 25
‘Hurry up, built a house.’
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4. NIN: 0 [= 跑到窗戶邊聽外面的女生說話].
0 [= runs to the window and listens to the girl talking outside].
LIN was carrying some blocks and tring to build a house in example 25. She asked NIN to build a house with her. Hearing the request, NIN applied a verbal avoidance to refuse her. He tried to switch the topic by showing her the letter he found. LIN did not accept the refusal and therefore repeated her request again. Facing the same request again, NIN used nonverbal avoidance to show his refusal. He simply remained silent and runs away from the LIN. In other similar examples, boys used other strategies as their first refusal; however, they relied on nonverbal avoidance in the end. They showed their unwillingness passively and hoped the interlocutor would abandon their requests.
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Chapter 5
Discussion and Conclusion
From analyzing the collected data, we come to know how children express refusals when interacting with their peers. In this chapter, we will summarize and discuss the major results we learned from children’s refusal performance. The refusal strategies children applied and how the concept of friendship related to the choice of these strategies will be discussed in 5.1. Children’s pragmatic and socio-cognitive ability reflected from their use of strategies will be examined in 5.2.The influence of gender in children’s choice of refusal strategies and the possible explanations will be discussed in 5.3 and the refusal sequences produced by children will be observed in 5.4. Finally, the limitation of our study will be pointed out and the suggestions for future study will be given in 5.5.
5.1 Children’s refusal strategies and maintenance of friendship
The findings showed that children applied a variety of refusal strategies, including direct and indirect strategies at the age of 4;7 to 5;10. There were a total of ten strategies identified in the data: (1) simple negation, (2) physical force, (3) negated ability, (4) reason, (5) alternative, (6) counterclaim, (7) conditional acceptance, (8) dissuade interlocutor, (9) verbal avoidance, and (10) nonverbal
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avoidance. Among these strategies, simple negation (31.8%) and reason (26.7%) are the strategies children adapted most frequently. And in terms of directness, indirect refusals (approximately 70%) were more frequently used than direct refusals.
Furthermore, children adopted a single strategy most of the time when refusing.
Children’s preference for indirect refusals indicates that they tried to avoid
confrontation with their peers. As Dunn (1996) pointed out, children may care more about maintaining continuous equable communication with their friends than they do
with their family members. The reason is that children’s relationships with their family members do not have to be “worked at” to ensure their continuation. In
contrast, their relationship with friends may break up if the individual does not try to maintain it. Compared with Wang’s research (2007) on refusals produced by a child
aged 4;8 in mother-child talk, we discovered that children in our data applied a lot more indirect strategies. Although the age of the subjects in our research and Wang’s study were similar, the child in Wang’s study used direct refusals about sixty percent
of the time when refusing his mother. Therefore, we can speculate that children are more indirect in peer talk than in mother-child conversation. Children put more effort into maintaining their friendships. They tried to be indirect most of the time because if there is no direct confrontation, conflict is less likely to be aroused.
The interesting phenomenon we observed in refusal sequence can also be used to
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prove that children value the friendship with their peers a lot. In the refusal sequences we found in children’s interaction, when children wanted to achieve their goals, they sometimes used the termination of friendship between them and their interlocutor as a threat. When this kind of threat is proposed, the interlocutor usually showed some compromise in their refusals. The phenomenon indicates that children bear the friendship in mind and strive to maintain it.
5.2 Children’s refusal strategies and the perspective taking ability
By examining children’s refusal, we can gain some insight into their pragmatic and social-cognitive development. Children’s application of strategies such as
alternatives, dissuade interlocutor, or conditional acceptance reveals that children were able to take others’ perspectives into account at this age. Take alternatives for example. Children understood the hearer’s need and tried to negotiate with the hearer
by providing other ways to fulfill the request. However, compared with adults’
refusals, which usually employed a combination of several strategies and adjuncts to modify the refusal (Beebe et al, 1990; Wang, 2001), children’s refusals tend to be
simpler and shorter. Although some uses of a combination of strategies were found in the data, the frequency was low. Furthermore, children seldom use adjuncts to modify their refusals as adults do. However, if compared with younger children who mainly rely on direct refusal according to the literature (Wu, 2010), children in our data are
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more mature. They applied more indirect strategies, and the percentage of other-oriented arguments was higher. It shows that children were on their way to more adult-like refusals.
5.3 Gender differences in Children’s Refusal Production
It is found from previous analysis that children tend to use more indirect strategies to refuse others. However, when we take speakers’ gender into consideration, we found that girls used more direct refusals than boys did. Girls used more simple negation than boys while boys applied more nonverbal avoidance than girls. When we examined further and took both speakers’ and interlocutors’ gender into consideration, we discovered that both gender performed differently when their interlocutors’ gender were different.
In the same-gender interactions, girls were more direct than boys. The girls in our data generated more simple negations than boys did. The result contradicts to Yang’s (2003) study which found that girls used more alternative and avoidance than boys did. The difference of the findings may due to the difference in the method of data collection. The data in her study were collected by showing the children cartoons which has the situation that a refusal is needed to be performed. Children were then asked to pretend that they were the characters in the cartoons and tried to generate a refusal. Facing the researchers, the children may think more carefully than in natural
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conversation before they made the refusal, and therefore their performance is different from the data we collected in natural conversations. In addition, in Yang’s study the situations designed involved interlocutors with different social statuses relative to the speaker in cartoon. The difference of interlocutors in her and our study may also cause the inconsistency in result.
However, our results are consistent with Kyratzis and Guo’s (2001) study. They compared the conflict talk of American children and Mainland Chinese children.
Chinese girls were observed to use the most direct strategies as American boys while Chinese boys applied a combination of direct and indirect strategies. They argued that the results in Chinese children’s conflict talk provide the evidence against the Separate World Hypothesis, which claims two genders developed different communicative styles since they mainly interact with members of their own sex.
Therefore, boys speak more directly and forcefully while girls speak more indirect and use mitigated strategies. Our results also challenge the Separate World Hypothesis.
The direct refusal strategies adapted by Taiwanese girls suggests that culture is an important factor we should consider when discussing gender difference.
In cross-gender interaction, girls became more direct while boys were more indirect than they were in same-gender interaction. Farris (2000) reported the similar result that Taiwanese girls in her research also used aggravated style of conflict talk in
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the cross-sex conflict, which is associated with masculine sex-typed style in the literature. Kyratzis and Guo’s (2001) also had a similar finding. In their study, the activity children involved is role playing in domestic scenarios. Therefore, the explanation they provided for girls’ directness is that in Chinese culture, domestic life is a highly valued domain and woman are given more power in this domain. They are the protectors of the norms surrounding domestic life. Therefore, girls tend to speak more directly than boys in their data as they learn from adult’s world.
In our data, however, children did not always role play in the domestic setting.
Nevertheless, girls still applied much more direct strategies than boys did. The explanation provided by Kyratzis and Guo’s (2001) may only be able to explain part of our finding. Therefore, we speculate that other reasons such as children’s intensity of friendship between different genders or the way parents educated their children may cause this phenomenon. As many studies suggested that children mainly play with other children of their same gender, they should value the friendship of the same-gender peer group more than cross-gender peer group. Therefore, they make less effort on maintaining the cross-gender friendship. Girls thus applied more direct refusal strategies when refusing boys. In terms of the way parents educated their children, as far as we know, many parents nowadays taught their boys to respect girls.
And boys should be a gentleman and treat girls nicely. This kind of concept may
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cause boys’ indirectness in making refusals. Therefore, they tried to avoid the conflict by using passive ways to refuse girls, such as verbal or nonverbal avoidance.
Other investigation may be needed to prove if the explanations are accurate.
However, no matter what the explanations are, our findings confirm that gender is socially constructed and are constructed differently in different culture. The different performance between American children and children in our data provides evidence of the importance of culture when dealing with gender differences.
5.4 Children’s refusal in sequence
When the children make a refusal, there are chances that the interlocutors resist to accept their refusal. They want to negotiate with the refuser and convince them to follow their requests. The refusal sequences in the present study show that children sometimes perform maturely in their negotiation. They adapted different refusal and request strategies to convince their interlocutors. They may provide justifications for their desire or try to give alternatives to meet both their and interlocutor’s need. They had the ability to reformation their refusals to respond to their interlocutors
re-requests. However, there are also cases that they performed childlike. They simply use insistence and repetition as their negotiation strategy. Usually, this kind of
sequential pattern is not helpful for settling the conflict between the children.
An interesting sequential pattern is found to be used mostly by boys when