Exercise 4: Making Your Refusals Incomplete

Leaving the sentence incomplete is a strategy used to appear less assertive and more hesitant.  It shows the speaker’s consideration for the hearer, and thus is regarded as polite.  In a study of refusals by native speakers of Japanese, 24% of the refusal expressions were left incomplete, and over half of them were used for someone of higher status than the speaker (Shimura, 1995).

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