A Study Of Gender Differences As Reflected In Chinese Request-Refusal Speech Act

Refusal, as one of the frequently used speech acts in daily life, is a face-threatening act. The refusers are usually required to employ polite refusal strategies to mitigate harm to the hearer's face and maintain the harmonious relationship between two interlocutors. Some linguists such as Beebe et al (1990) have conducted much research on refusal strategy and published many highbrow theoretical papers. Their researches however are largely from the perspective of cross-cultural comparison and socio-pragmatics rather than from the perspective of gender.The data in this study was collected by means of modified Discourse Completion Test in questionnaire form. Eighty subjects were selected by systematic sampling from non-English major sophomore in Jiangxi College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Half being males and half females, the only variable between the two groups of subjects is gender. Analysis is done on the differences between male and female in declining a request by exploring the refusal strategies they adopt in eight different situations. After a detailed data analysis, in relation to three socio-pragmatic factors:social distance (familiarity), social status (dominance) and sex of requester, it is found that there are big gender differences in the choice of refusal strategies. It is also revealed that gender can interact with the socio-pragmatic factors to influence the choice of refusal strategies, and the specific data indicates that male and female respondents both prefer to use indirect strategy and have high frequency in giving reasons/excuses/explanations or regret/apology or alternatives without many obvious differences in using these strategies. However, there are great differences in their usage of other categories of refusal strategies. In general, in refusal speech act, females would tend to express their intention of refusal in a more indirect, euphemistic and polite way. They usually elaborate the reasons for the choice of their refusal strategies in detail. Moreover, females'apologies are different from those of the males and they tend to make a repetition of apology. These gender differences indicate that the females care more about the requester's face and feelings. What's more, along with socio-pragmatic factors, when looking at the gender differences in their choice of request-refusal strategies in eight different situations, the findings show that females are more sensitive to the interlocutors' social distance and their social power, while males are more sensitive to sex of the requester as well as their own higher social positions. And the two groups both concern more about female's feelings. It is pointed that the gender differences may attribute to the different roles male and female play in society and their different cognitions of the face behavior and politeness.Through the analysis and concentration on the speech act of refusal, we know more about the gender differences between male and female in their use of request-declining strategies, which is helpful for people to conduct cross-gender communication in social interaction. Besides, selecting Chinese refusal as the object of the study shed lights on the feasibility of applying western pragmatics to Chinese researches and developing pragmatic in Chinese.