Gender Distinction As Reflected In Different Invitation-Declining Strategies Adopted By Chinese Male And Female College Students

To date, some linguists have conducted their research on refusal strategy,e.g. Beebe et al. (1990). But their researches are often carried out from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective rather than from the perspective of gender, especially in the Chinese setting.This paper probes into the differences between Chinese male and female college students in declining an invitation by exploring the refusal strategies they apply in three different situations. The author has collected some data through questionnaires,that is, in the form of a discourse completion test (DCT). After a detailed data analysis, the author finds that there are great differences between male and female respondents in their refusal strategies. The data shows that male and female respondents both have high frequency in giving excuses/reasons/explanations or regret/apology as well as in the use of mitigated refusals. However, great differences exist in their use of other categories of refusal strategies. Generally speaking, females tend to decline an invitation in a more indirect, elaborated and detailed way. They explain much more and the features of female language are quite evident in the refusals. Moreover, females'apologies are different from those of the males. All of these gender differences tend to tell us that females show more consideration for the inviter's feelings and face.In addition to the gender differences in declining, the author has also compared the refusals in different situations and find that, first, the sex of the addressee is an important variable which will affect the refusal of the speaker; second, ritual refusal is different from substantive refusal in reasons/excuses/explanations and directness.Hopefully, this research can help us know more about ourselves through concentration on the speech act of refusal and know more about the differences in the way language is used in invitation-declining by different genders.