Astudy On Gender Differences In Speechact Of Refusal Performed By Chinese College Students

Speech act of refusal is one of the significant research topics in Pragmatics. With the development of Pragmatics in recent years, the studies concerning speech acts have made considerable achievements. Refusals are frequently performed in our daily lives, lots of scholars have done a lot of studies on speech act of refusal from the perspectives of second-language acquisition, pragmatics and politeness, and many achievements have been obtained. However, there are few researches accomplished on the speech act of refusal from gender perspective in Chinese male and female college students.This paper mainly aims to study gender difference in Chinese male and female college students through speech act theory. Speech act theory created by Austin and Searle, which suggests that"to say something is to do something."So speech act emphasizes the roles interlocutors play in the process of communication. Based on Austin and Searle's theory, Brown and Levinson proposed"Face theory", which includes"positive face"and"negative face". Speech act of refusals are frequently adopted in our daily life. Due to its face-threatening nature, interlocutors have to take politeness into consideration and use some politeness strategies to mitigate its threat to the refusee's face.Based on the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies and Gu Yueguo's politeness principles, this study is conducted from the perspective of gender difference so as to investigate the similarities and differences of the refusal strategies used by Chinese male and female college students with a particular focus on the speech act of refusal. This paper will collect some data through questionnaires,that is, in the form of a discourse completion test (DCT), and will make a survey about the four relationships refusing to invitation, suggestion, request, offer respectively. The author finds that there are great differences between male and female students in their refusal strategies after a detailed data analysis. Male college students tend to use more direct refusal strategy while female college students tend to use more indirect refusal strategy; female students use more polite strategy than male students for refusal. The significance of this study is that the author hopes through concentration on the speech act of refusal, this research can help us know more about ourselves, know more about the differences in the way language is used in speech act of refusal by different genders. At the same time it will be helpful for people's understanding of daily communication and may also help people improve their communicative effects, which can make cross-gender communication go more smoothly.