The study, conducted by Erol Poyraz of Kafkas University in Türkiye, draws on the field of ethnopragmatics and Cultural Script Theory, which treats culturally specific concepts as flexible interpretive resources rather than rigid rules. This non-essentialist stance matters: the three Turkish orientations were analyzed not as deterministic scripts that compel behavior, but as living frameworks speakers activate situationally. The theoretical backdrop is interlanguage pragmatics, the study of how nonnative speakers acquire and use the social rules of a second language. Refusals are a classic testing ground because they are not single utterances but multi-step sequences, orchestrated to reject a request without severing the social bond, and they demand sensitivity to power, social distance, and perceived imposition.

To capture both the patterns and the reasoning behind them, the study used a convergent parallel mixed-methods design. Sixty second-year education faculty students, aged 18 to 21 and all native speakers of Turkish with B1 to B2 English proficiency, completed written discourse completion tests consisting of ten refusal scenarios in which power (higher, equal, or lower) and social distance (close or distant) were systematically varied. They then performed oral role-plays mirroring those scenarios, filled out retrospective perception reports immediately afterward, and a subset of twenty participants, selected for maximum variation in their performance, took part in semi-structured interviews. All interactions were conducted entirely in English, and the culturally labeled concepts were never mentioned during data collection to avoid priming. The procedure yielded 812 codeable refusal moves: 579 from the written tests and 233 from the role-plays.

The quantitative results are striking in their consistency. Indirect strategies dominated, accounting for 78.1 percent of all responses, with excuse, reason, and explanation sequences alone making up 43.9 percent. Blunt, direct refusals were rare at just 6.3 percent. More telling was how mitigation density, the number of softening moves packed into each refusal, varied with context. A two-way repeated-measures ANOVA showed that both power and social distance significantly shaped elaboration, with all three power contrasts significant after Bonferroni correction. Learners stacked roughly twice as many mitigating devices when refusing a professor as when refusing a subordinate. Social distance, however, only amplified mitigation when power was already elevated; at equal or lower power, familiarity made no significant difference. This conditional interaction suggests learners were reading each situation holistically rather than applying a fixed formula.

Sequencing analysis added another layer. Five recurrent multi-move patterns, such as regret followed by excuse-reason-explanation and then an alternative suggestion, accounted for 81 percent of the dataset, a concentration far beyond what chance would predict among more than 200 theoretically possible combinations. Two-thirds of all refusals contained two or more mitigation elements. Role-plays elicited significantly more empathy marking than the written tests, with empathy rising from 5.5 percent to 12.9 percent, indicating that real-time interaction with a live interlocutor heightens affective involvement in ways that written prompts cannot capture.

The qualitative strand is where the three cultural orientations come into focus. Ayıp, the orientation toward social appropriateness and moral accountability, was the most frequently coded pattern, appearing in 76 instances, or 34.4 percent, and clustering overwhelmingly in hierarchical contexts. When refusing a higher-status interlocutor, learners produced extended apologies and positioned themselves as morally accountable actors. One participant in a role-play told a teacher, Hocam, I feel really bad to say no. I’m very sorry, but I already have another responsibility at that time. In interviews, the reasoning became explicit: If I say no directly to a teacher, it sounds very wrong, one student explained. Another noted that even in Turkish you cannot just say no like that. Crucially, the elaboration was not driven by linguistic uncertainty but by a felt obligation to demonstrate respect. Ayıp functions as a constraint on minimalism, making an unmitigated refusal feel morally inadequate.

Hatır operated differently. Coded in 61 instances, or 27.6 percent, it surfaced most strongly in peer and friendship contexts, where the stakes are relational rather than hierarchical. The characteristic move was to make the relationship visible before or alongside the rejection. I really want to help you because you are my close friend, but unfortunately I already made another plan, one participant wrote. Hatır does not prohibit refusal; it frames it. The bond must be foregrounded so the refusal cannot be read as indifference. Linguistically this appeared as relational prefacing and loyalty-grounded justifications. Interestingly, in the equal-power, distant condition, Hatır rather than Ayıp was the dominant orientation, prompting the researcher to speculate that Hatır may function not only as a marker of existing closeness but as a bid for future closeness, a way of signaling openness toward someone not yet known well.

Gönül alma, the third orientation, was unique in that it activated primarily after the refusal had been delivered, appearing in 45 instances, or 20.4 percent. It was most visible in the role-play data, where real-time awareness of the interlocutor’s emotional state prompted repair moves. I cannot come today, but maybe next week we can meet, one participant offered after declining an invitation. In interviews, learners described feeling that a refusal ending at no is unfinished, that something nice must be added so the person does not feel bad. For these speakers, a refusal remains interactionally open until emotional balance is restored, extending the speech act into a sequence of rejection, acknowledgment, and future-oriented gesture. The lower frequency of repair moves in the written tests, where no real interlocutor was present, underscores that this orientation responds to the immediacy of actual interaction. Notably, 39 instances, or 17.6 percent, showed two or more orientations co-occurring, concentrated in role-plays and close-distance contexts, suggesting that relational complexity and interactional immediacy jointly activate layered sociopragmatic reasoning.

The convergence of the two analytical strands is the study’s most compelling technical achievement. A joint display mapping mean mitigation density against the dominant orientation for each condition revealed distinct density signatures: the highest values corresponded to Ayıp dominance in hierarchical contexts, mid-range values to Hatır in equal-power conditions, and the lowest to Gönül alma in lower-power contexts. Mitigation density, in other words, functions as a quantitative index of qualitatively identified cultural reasoning. The findings challenge universal face-based models of politeness, whose calculus does not accommodate the moral accountability central to Ayıp or the reparative logic of Gönül alma, and they align with cross-linguistic evidence from Chinese mianzi to Persian ta’ārof showing that first-language sociopragmatic architecture, not proficiency alone, shapes second-language refusal production.

The practical implications reach into the classroom. The author argues that rather than treating Ayıp-, Hatır-, and Gönül alma-oriented reasoning as interference, English language teachers should make these orientations visible through consciousness-raising activities and role-plays with retrospective reflection, treating first-language sociopragmatic knowledge as a resource for intercultural communicative competence. The study does carry limitations: it was conducted at a single site, the B1 to B2 proficiency band leaves higher levels unexamined, and the cross-sectional design cannot disentangle developmental stage from cultural orientation, a concern raised by prior longitudinal work showing mitigation sometimes decreasing as proficiency grows. Still, the core message stands. When these learners say no in English, they are performing a culturally intelligent act, reading the social geometry of each encounter and drawing on a coherent relational logic carried across linguistic borders, one refusal at a time.

Subject of Research: The influence of Turkish cultural concepts Ayıp, Hatır, and Gönül alma on how Turkish EFL learners produce refusals in English

Article Title: Cultural orientations in interaction: Ayıp, Hatır, and Gönül alma in Turkish EFL learners’ English refusals

Article References: Poyraz, E. (2026). Cultural orientations in interaction: Ayıp, Hatır, and Gönül alma in Turkish EFL learners’ English refusals. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 474. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01780-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01780-3

Keywords: interlanguage pragmatics, pragmatic transfer, refusal strategies, Turkish EFL learners, sociopragmatics, ethnopragmatics, cultural scripts, Ayıp, Hatır, Gönül alma, intercultural communication, second language acquisition