<![CDATA[This study examines the metapragmatic reasoning of Javanese EFL learners (JLE) and native speakers of English (NSE) in attributing impoliteness to refusal utterances, with particular attention to the cultural values and pragmalinguistic features that participants identified as evaluative triggers. A two-phase sequential design was employed, using a Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) as a cognitive elicitation trigger followed by Retrospective Verbal Report (RVR) interviews with 10 JLE and 10 NSE participants. Thematic analysis of the RVR transcripts produced seven themes organized across two dimensions: the cultural values and moral orientations underlying impoliteness attribution, and the pragmalinguistic features identified as triggers. The findings indicate that both groups evaluated refusals against shared evaluative structures, including hierarchical legitimacy, moral responsibility, empathetic attentiveness, and epistemic fairness, though the cultural content through which these structures were expressed differed systematically between groups. The absence of lexical mitigation markers was the most consistently cited pragmalinguistic trigger, evaluated as a signal of moral inattentiveness to the relational cost of refusal rather than as a missing politeness formula. These findings reframe impoliteness attribution as a moral-evaluative process operating at two levels simultaneously: a shared evaluative structure and culturally specific content, and a distinction with potential implications for cross-cultural pragmatics theory and EFL pragmatic pedagogy in Indonesia.]]>
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