Differences in the implementation of refusal speech act in American and Russian communicative cultures

American English and Russian and investigates their refusal strategies from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The study aims to find similarities and differences between the ways of refusing requests, offers and invitations in different social contexts in these languages. Due to the lack of comparative studies of speech acts in American and Russian communicative cultures, for the first time a comparative analysis of speech act Refusal was conducted through the prism of cultural and ethnocultural communication styles. We employed multiple methods including the methods of observation, linguoculturological, pragmatic, comparative and discursive analyzes. The data for our work were collected through questionnaires: 50 informants in the United States and 50 informants in Russia were surveyed; thereby we have obtained 100 questionnaires or 1400 communicative expressions of refusal.

 The obtained results give new findings to Intercultural Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics and Contrastive Linguistics. They confirm the interconnectedness of culture, language and communication and highlight the perspective of interdisciplinary studies of language use. The knowledge of communicative differences in refusal is necessary for the acquisition and development of pragmatic competence of L2 English learners and successful intercultural communication.