Gender Differences In Refusal Speech Act Reflected In Chinese Dating Shows

Refusal speech act is quite ubiquitous in daily life, but it is face-threatening by nature. So people usually apply different refusal strategies to ease the tension and embarrassment caused by refusals. In social life, the ability to refuse other people appropriately plays a very critical role in maintaining a good interpersonal relationship. Thus, more and more scholars have started to pay attention to researches on refusal speech acts. However, many related researches are confined to the study of English refusal strategies, and researches on gender differences in Chinese refusal speech acts are only a few. Besides, many existing researches on this topic collect research data by using Discourse completion Test (DCT). But DCT has its own limitations. So there is a need to do some further researches on gender differences in Chinese refusal speech acts by using different methods for data collecting.This thesis applies both qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze gender differences in refusal speech acts conducted by male and female participants in dating shows, and the entire study will be based on Speech Act Theory, Politeness Principle and cooperative Principle. In the thesis, gender differences in refusal speech acts are discussed from the two perspectives, that is, direct refusals and indirect refusals.After data analysis, the paper draws to the following conclusion:first, women prefer to use more words and refusal strategies to elaborate on their intentions and reasons to refuse, but men prefer to refuse concisely. However, this difference also has its exception. Second, women tend to use more roundabout and indirect ways to refuse while men are more direct and aggressive. Third, the five favorite refusal strategies of both men and women share some similarities as well as differences. The similarities lie in the fact that both genders choose reason/excuse/explanation as their best choice to refuse other people. But there some differences in the types and percentage of occurrence of refusal strategies chosen by two genders. Fourth, sometimes a same refusal strategy is used by two genders differently. Furthermore, they also have their own preference to different subtypes of a same refusal strategy. In accordance with data analysis, women’s refusals usually adopt a combination of different refusal strategies, so they are rich and varied in contents and forms. Generally speaking, women’s refusals are more polite and interlocutor-oriented. In the end of the thesis, the possible causes of gender differences in Chinese refusal speech acts are discussed, and these gender differences are perhaps due to some social and cultural factors.The significance of the research lies in the new method for data collecting and the further analysis of gender differences from the perspective of different subtypes of a refusal strategy.