Making a Non-Personal Reason
Sabrina : I wanna go and they dont.
Jason : Im not really ready to leave either.
Datum no. 38 The first pair part of conversation shows that Sabrina asks Jason to go
home with her because her friends do not want to leave the party. Since Jason still wants to spend his time in the party, he refuses Sabrina’s request by saying “Im
not really ready to leave either”. In his statement, the word “really” is a mitigator used to make the dispreferred response less challenging to the hearer. In other
words, Jason wants to give a weak refusal to Sabrina’s request as a way to minimize the effect of the dispreferred act.
Furthermore, Jason also performs his dispreferred social act by using a mitigator “kind of”. In this case, the use of mitigator “kind of” is similar to the
mitigator “really” in the datum 40. Sabrina
: But I wanna go home. We have a big day tomorrow. Jason
: Babe, Im in the middle of a conversation right now. For you to ask me to just walk out on it, its kind of rude.
Datum no. 39 Although her first request is already refused by Jason, Sabrina keeps
asking Jason to go home with her in order to make the second pair part which is an acceptance. Unfortunately, the request is still responded by a refusal. In this
datum, Jason uses the mitigator “kind of” instead of “really” to express his dispreferred response. However, the use of those mitigators is similar; that is to
make a dispreferred social act sounds less challenging. Both conversations happen in a Bachelor’s party conducted by Jason and
Sabrina. Sabrina asks Jason to go home with her as they have a big day tomorrow. Yet, Jason refuses Sabrina’s request twice because he thinks that it is impolite or
rude manner to ask people to walk out when they are in the middle of a conversation with someone else. Thus, to make it less challenging, he uses the
mitigator to minimize the effect of dispreferred response.