In this study, I compare English and Japanese speech acts of refusal observed in business communications at multinational companies. Participants to this research are businesspeople, in Japan, who are native Japanese speakers （JS for Japanese speakers）and businesspeople, in Canada and the United States of America, who are native English speakers （ES for English speakers）. Since refusal is one of the most delicate speech acts which might spoil human relations, people carefully choose polite expressions to avoid misunderstandings and friction. I focus on the contents of a request that affect refusal speech acts as a factor, in addition to hierarchical relationships and intimacy. I set two different load levels of request: one is a light load request i.e., a request typical of everyday life at a workplace and the other is a heavy load request i.e., a request in which the listener might have to violate company policies. This study seeks to clarify how JS and ES maintain the human relations in refusal speech acts, and to make comparison between Japanese and English languages in terms of Facework and the words and phrases used.
Yotsuya et al. (Thu,) studied this question.