Gender Differences In Refusal Speech Act Reflected In English Movies

So far, most studies on refusal speech acts both at home and aboard belong to comparative studies on cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences in performing such an act while few studies have been conducted on its gender differences. Considering this, the present study is designed to investigate the gender differences in refusal strategies and explore the possible causes and interpretations of such differences, taking sample dialogues from four English movies as its data for analysis, within the framework of Austin's and Searle's Speech Act Theories, Brown & Levinson's Face Theory, and Leech's Politeness Principle as well as Grice's Cooperative Principle.This thesis adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches of data analysis. In the first step, a variety of refusal strategies employed respectively by the male and female roles in the four sample movies are illustrated with examples and the statistical results concerning the frequencies of these strategies are presented by means of figures. Based on these statistical results, a general quantitative comparison of the gender differences in the use of refusal strategies is conducted.It is found that the total number of refusal strategies used by the female is more than those used by the male, and that comparatively men use more direct verbal strategies and non-verbal strategies such as Silence or Hesitation, Facial Expression and Physical Departure while women tend to use more indirect verbal strategies to express their illocutionary force of refusal. Although men also have the awareness of politeness and face protection, they approach only a relatively few means to achieve these purposes.The gender differences in refusal strategies may be ascribed to a variety of reasons such as that women and men have different biological bases, social desires and psychological inclinations, and that the two genders grow up in different sub-cultures and tend to follow their own stereotypical pattern of communication: the male tends to use a competition-based conversation model whereas the female tends to use a collaborative one. Gender differences in refusal speech act can also be interpreted within pragmatic framework constituted by Speech Act Theory, Face Theory, Politeness Principle and Cooperative Principle.This thesis is significant in reminding people to take into more consideration their face-threatening speech acts such as refusal and also reminding them that they should try all communicative means to save the face of the communication partners while trying to realize their communicative intention. And it encourages people to develop greater awareness of the interrelation and interaction between language usage and speech context. But it is also limited in many respects such as that the sample survey is not extensive enough in scale to make the result more persuasive, the data of the research has been drawn from four English movies only, which may not necessarily reflect the realistic situation of the two genders'refusal behaviors. These limitations and inadequacies need to be taken into consideration in the further researches of the same field.