Abstract

From a grammatical point of view, negation is considered a linguistic universal, whereby differences in expression across languages are not necessarily rendered syntactically. The focus of this paper is not, however, on syntactic but rather pragmatic aspects and cultural scripts associated with indirect negation, and limited to the cultures of Saudi Arabia and Japan. Based on linguistic and paralinguistic cues from audio-visual data and ethnographic data collection, a pragmatic comparison between the seemingly contrastive cultures of Japan and Saudi Arabia is carried out. Interestingly, pragmatic aspects of discourse such as “face saving” (shame, honour, and conflict avoidance) present similar strategies in the two languages involved, as related to the functions of refusal and denial.