Due to their largely non-routinized forms and their not being retrievable in computerised corpus searches, refusals have hitherto not been examined from a diachronic perspective. The present paper presents an inventory of refusal strategies in Early Modern English drama texts. Five comedies from two periods (1560–1599 and 1720–1760), respectively, taken from the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 ( Kyto and Culpeper 2006 ) were examined manually and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis lead to an alternative classification of refusals which differs considerably from the frequently used taxonomy by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990) . The proposed classification takes into account three levels of analysis: the propositional content of the utterance, the functional super-strategy, and the speaker’s stance. The development of refusal within the period under investigation partially matches findings regarding related speech acts that show a development towards increased indirectness ( Culpeper and Demmen 2011 , Pakkala-Weckstrom 2008 , Del Lungo Camiciotti 2008 ).

中文翻译：

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早期现代英语戏剧文本中的拒绝

由于它们的形式不合常规，并且不能在计算机语料库中进行检索，因此从历时的角度出发，至今尚未对拒绝进行过检查。本文介绍了早期现代英语戏剧文本中的拒绝策略清单。分别检查了两个时期（1560年至1599年和1720年至1760年）的五个喜剧，这些喜剧取自1560年至1760年的英语对话（Kyto和Culpeper 2006年），并进行了定性和定量分析。分析导致拒绝的替代分类，这与Beebe，Takahashi和Uliss-Weltz（1990）的常用分类法有很大不同。拟议的分类考虑了三个层次的分析：话语的命题内容，功能性超级策略和说话者的立场。