It's Not What You Sign, It's How You Sign It: Politeness in American Sign Language

4. Rejections in ASL and English

4 Rejections in ASL and English 106 Turning down a request can threaten a relationship and one’s involvement because the interlocutor may be seen as uncooperative. Of course, not all rejections have the same effect. If someone makes an outlandish request, you can usually feel confident saying no. There is usually little threat to face or to the relationship for rejecting such a request. However, if someone asks you to pass the salt that is sitting right beside you, saying no can seem antisocial ; the request seems simple enough, so the rejection would seem quite odd. As a rule, difficult requests make for easier rejections and easy requests make for more difficult rejections. Shared Politeness Strategies The strategies used in rejections in the DCT data comprise a more limited set than those used in making requests. Six politeness strategies are shared by both language groups in the mitigation of rejections1 : the independence strategies of (a) hedge, (b) apologize; the involvement strategies of (c) presuppose/raise/assert common ground, (d) offer/promise, and (e) give (or ask for) reasons; and the indirect strategy of (f) violate Relevance maxim—give hint. 1. The category of direct strategies is not listed here because there is only one instance of a direct rejection and that is in the ASL rejection data, and it is discussed later in this chapter. Hedge The hedge strategy is defined as “” in ASL and specific phrases such as I don’t know that I would be able to . . . in English. The function of such expressions is to soften the rejection. Hedging occurs 64 times total in the ASL DCT data, but 3 times as often in difficult (+R) rejections (48 instances) as in easy (–R) rejections (16 instances), showing a strong tendency toward difficult (+R) contexts. This strategy is used more than any other in the ASL rejection data and is often used two or three times in a single difficult (+R) rejection. There are only two instances of a hedge/tag question, “”/q, in the ASL rejection data. This strategy, which appears in the form of a question, is used to mitigate an offer/promise, as in the following:   -   , “”/tight lips /q [translation: Could you have someone else do this, do you think?]. All of the other hedges appear as declaratives rather than as question forms. “” appears with a variety of strategies, and most often appears with reasons (24 instances) and the head rejection, where the speaker overtly turns down the request in the rejection (13 instances). It also occurs with the opening, a direct apology (), and offer/promise. It is clear that the sign, “” (with appropriate nonmanual modifiers; NMMs), is an important and prevalent component of many rejections in the data, especially difficult (+R) rejections. See Table 4.1 for the distribution of hedge (“”) in the ASL rejection data. 107 Rejections in ASL and English Table 4.1 The Distribution of Hedge in the ASL Rejection Data Note. N = 7 native ASL signers, 42 DCT ratings (6 ratings per participant). Total occurrences of hedge reported over total number of elicitations (7 participants per discourse context). s ’ e e y o l p m E n o i t c e j e r ) r e w o P – ( s ’ r e k r o w o C n o i t c e j e r ) r e w o P = ( s ’ r o s i v r e p u S n o i t c e j e r ) r e w o P + ( : l a t o T s n o i t c e j e r y s a E ) g n i k n a R – ( 7 / 5 7 / 4 7 / 7 1 2 / 6 1 s n o i t c e j e r t l u c i f f i D ) g n i k n a R + ( 7 / 9 1 7 / 6 1 7 / 3 1 1 2 / 8 4 : l a t o T 4 1 / 4 2 4 1 / 0 2 4 1 / 0 2 108 Rejections in ASL and English Independence strategies are used little in the English rejection data, as is the case with hedges, which appear only three times in the English rejections. For coding purposes, hedging in the English data is defined as such phrases as I don’t think I can . . . right now, I don’t...