Gender Differences In Performing Invitation In Chinese

Invitation is a common communication phenomenon in our daily lives. As a positive and polite social behavior, it is influenced by many variables such as communicator's age, gender, levels of education, social status and social relationship. The realization of invitation has been a focal topic among scholars in various fields, especially pragmatics. However, most previous studies concentrated on either the realization of speech act of invitation and factors which affected its realization; scant attention, if any, was given to gender differences in invitation. Consequently, it is necessary to explicitly look into how gender affects our making of invitation in Chinese.Using a discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire, the present study surveys how people perform the speech act of invitation in Chinese, and conducts elaborate analyses, qualitative and quantitative, into the collected data, on aspects such as the linguistic forms of invitation, the relationship between social variables and the choice of the invitation strategies, and response to invitation.Eventually, the study finds out that:1) When addressing an invitation, males tend to use imperative strategy more frequently than females do, while females tend to use inquiry strategy more frequently than males do. When using imperative strategy, the frequency of exclamation in females is obviously higher than that of males.2) Females tend to use auxiliary speech act more frequently than males, and their usage is more diverse.3) When addressing an invitation, females prefer to make a greeting while males always don't. But males employ more types of resources than females do in the general. Females'greeting appears more inhibited than males'.4) The invitational discourse sequences of females are evidently longer than that of males, while the quantity of discourse of females performs alike.5) The frequency of polite idioms using in females is higher than that of males, especially in formal invitations. Females are better at applying expressive words than males, and their invitational discourses are imbued with strong emotions. 6) The choices of invitation strategies of males and females are both influenced by interpersonal distance, social power and the gender of invitee. There is slight difference in the sensibility of both genders to the social variables.7) In a common situation, there is nearly no difference between males'choices of the response strategies and those of the females'. Both genders easily accept invitations from the same gender while displaying care in taking invitations from the opposite gender8) Generally speaking, females'expressions of invitation are more euphemistic and polite than those of males'.These findings show that the realization of speech act of invitation of both male and female takes on a salient characteristic: consistent generally but different internally. This may give an implication to the pragmatic researchers: they should pay attention to the universals as well as concentrating on the individual differences.