A Study Of Gender Difference In Refusals Between Male And Female College Students In China

To date, most researches on the speech act of refusal have been conducted from the perspective of cross-cultural comparison and interlanguage pragmatics. Few have been done on gender difference in refusals, and even fewer on gender difference in Chinese refusals. However, gender is said to be an important social factor which might influence the form and content of refusals.The present study examines gender differences in terms of the average number, frequency, content, and lexicon of refusals with regard to subjects’ gender, refusee’s gender, and types of eliciting acts (request, invitation, suggestion, offer). It aims to find out whether gender difference exists in the realization of refusals and whether women are more polite and more indirect than men in making a refusal.Altogether 200 subjects took part in the study,100 males and 100 females. They were further divided into four groups:50 males and 50 females were asked to refuse a female peer; another 50 males and 50 females were asked to refuse a male peer. The data were drawn from a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaire with two versions (one with a male refusee, the other with a female refusee), and were coded according to a modified version of the classical taxonomy of refusal strategies developed by Beebe et al. (1990). The data were analyzed both quantitatively (using SPSS 11.5) and qualitatively.The results show that females are generally more polite and more euphemistic in refusals because firstly, females use more tokens of refusal strategies in each response while males make more economical refusals; secondly, females tend to use negative ability, indirect strategies, adjuncts and linguistic devices in a higher frequency; thirdly, females offer more specific reasons. To a certain extent, the findings confirm Holmes’ (1995) hypothesis that women regard talking as a way to establish harmonious relationship while men regard talking as way to gain information, also women attach more importance to politeness in language use. Interestingly, males generally tend to refuse a female peer in a more polite and euphemistic way. The reason might be the fact that they consider women as more fragile, who care more about face and value politeness in interaction.It is hoped that the present study could shed light on gender difference in refusals in Chinese and could contribute to cross-gender communications as well as to the teaching and acquisition of the speech act of refusal in Chinese.