A Study of Processing Refusal Situation for Chinese Old People

摘要

The paper is to investigate the processing of five situations by old Chinese people. By using questionnaire and interview for five different situations, we found that there are different responses to process the refusal situations. The elder old people have the tendency to refuse in more diplomatic way,; while the relative young old people tend to refuse in a direct way. The findings are discussed in terms of counterfactuality theory, which might be beneficial for understanding pragmatic ability of old people.