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).