COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AMONGST THE YOUNG MALAY GENERATION: AN ANALYSIS ON THE REFUSAL SPEECH ACT

Refusal speech act means an act of illocution that refuse or does not accept request, invitation, suggestion, order, prohibition or offer. Hetti Waluati Triana and Idris Aman (2011) argue that the younger generation today tend to choose a more direct strategy and less polite manner in their way of life. Nasariah et al. (2010), on the other hand explains that the eastern people are very concern about politeness when they speak of any matter, such as turning down a request. Thus, this study intends to identify the refusal language pattern and strategy of the younger Malay generation and further elaborate the link between refusal language strategy and politeness aspect. In this study, the Refusal Taxonomy proposed by Beebe et. al (1990) is employed as an approach to identify the patterns of refusal strategies used by the young generation. The research data was obtained through refusal response in written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) by 50 Malay students from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) aged 20 to 30 years old. DCT comprises four categories of refusal, namely refusal of invitation, offer, request and suggestion. The findings of this studyis that in all categories of refusal situations, respondents tend to use indirect strategies as opposed to direct strategies. Besides that this study also found that there is another addition in the refusal strategy other than what was proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). The research samples also use divine expressions as a refusal response that serves to restore the situation. In addition, the results of the study also found that the refusal strategies used by the young Malay generation are also polite. This shows that the younger Malay generation still practice politeness when they have to refuse.