Offers and refusals: A postcolonial pragmatics perspective

在后殖民社会的语言学研究中，语用学被严重忽视。该项目采用务实的方法，在两个后殖民国家：喀麦隆和加纳提供服务。从对比比较的角度，本文探讨了这两个社区中英语变体（和洋泾浜语）的提供和拒绝模式，试图确定这些社区的群体或集体文化和语言混合如何影响说话者对提供的反应。要约是一种佣金，除了使要约人承诺将来采取某种行动外，受要约人还会根据对要约人的信任程度、（种族、社会）群体互动规则、（种族、社会）群体边界的开放程度、在发出要约时使用的语言选择以及发出要约时使用的语言的礼貌程度来接受或拒绝要约。在此基础上，本研究直接关注拒绝提供的方式，力求达到以下目标：1)调查和分析提供（服务、援助和帮助）的语言策略以及拒绝这些提议的方式（例如，缓解、使用亲属关系术语、回避等），2)探索和解释后殖民集体或群体文化系统对拒绝提议的影响，3)验证多语言后殖民社区中语言之间的转换（土著语言、官方语言和皮钦语）是否影响互动者对提议的反应，4)确立说话者拒绝提供的年龄、性别和社会文化等级的地位；4)纠正现有的关于后殖民社区务实行为的著作的匮乏，尽管这一现象的程度很小。

In linguistic studies of postcolonial communities, pragmatics has been significantly ignored. This project adopts a pragmatic approach to offering in two postcolonial countries: Cameroon and Ghana. From a contrastive-comparative perspective, it explores pattems of offering and refusing in the English varieties (and Pidgins) in these two communities with a bid to establish how the group or collective cultures and mix of languages of these communities influence speakers' response to offers. Offers are commissives which beside committing the offerer to some future action, are accepted or refused by the offeree depending on the amount of trust in the offerer, rules of (ethnic, social) group interaction, opening of (ethnic, social) group boundaries, choice of language used in the offer utterance, and levels of politeness of the language in which the offer is made. On this basis, this study, with a direct focus on patterns of refusing offers, seeks to achieve the following: 1) investigate and analyse the linguistic strategies through which offers (for services, assistance, and help) are made and how these are refused (e.g. mitigation, use of kinship terms, evasiveness, etc.), 2) explore and account for the impact of postcolonial collective or group cultural systems on the refusal of offers, 3) verify if the switch between languages in multilingual postcolonial communities (indigenous language, official language and pidgin) affects interactants' reaction to offers, 4) establish the place of age, gender and sociocultural hierarchy in speakers' refusal of offers, and 4) redress the existing paucity, however slightly, of works on pragmatic behaviour in postcolonial communities.