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。该项目以务实的方式在两个后殖民国家提供服务：喀麦隆和加纳。本文从对比对比的角度，探讨了这两个社区的英语变体(和皮钦语)中的提议和拒绝模式，试图确定这两个社区的群体或集体文化以及语言的混合如何影响说话者对提议的反应。要约是一种让步，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)群体互动的规则、(种族、社会)群体边界的开放、要约话语中使用的语言选择以及要约所用语言的礼貌程度而接受或拒绝要约。在此基础上，本研究试图达到以下目的：1)调查和分析提供服务、帮助和帮助的语言策略以及这些策略是如何被拒绝的(如缓和、亲属称谓的使用、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(土著语言、官方语言和洋泾宾语)之间的语言转换是否影响交际者对提议的反应，4)确定年龄地点，4)纠正目前关于后殖民社区实用行为的著作很少的问题，尽管数量很少。

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.