Gender Differences In Refusal Speech Act

Refusal, as one of the frequently used speech acts in daily life，is a face-threatening act. The refusers areusually required to employ polite refusal strategies to mitigate harm to the hearer s face and maintain theharmonious relationship between two interlocutors. With the development of Pragmatics in recent years, thestudies concerning speech acts have made considerable achievements. However, many related researches areconfined to the study of English refusal strategies, and researches on gender differences in Chinese refusalspeech acts are only a few.This paper mainly aims to analyze gender differences in refusal speech acts conducted by the male and thefemale participants in dating shows through speech act theory, Politeness Principle and cooperative Principle.The paper applies both qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on the theoretical framework of Brownand Levinson s politeness strategies and Gu Yueguo s politeness principles, this study is conducted from theperspective of gender difference so as to investigate the similarities and differences of the refusal strategies usedby the male and the female guest with a particular focus on the speech act of refusal. Regarding the popularity ofthe application of DCT (written form) in current studies, this thesis chooses to apply a new form to collectresearch data that is collecting data from dating shows.Refusal speech acts performed by the female or male participants in the shows will be collected bywatching shows and taking notes. Dating shows involved in this study are including: If you are the one (非诚勿扰）， Take me out (我们约会吧）and one out100(百里挑一). In this study, there are altogether60episodes of dating shows involved in data，there are altogether120refusal speech acts performed by maleparticipants and120refusal speech acts performed by female participants. The study mainly takes the genderdifference into consideration between the two groups when they choose refusal strategies, in other words, thisstudy takes gender difference between the male and the female participants in the shows as the only variable. Bythis way, we can examine the gender difference between the male and the female when they make speech act ofrefusals. After a detailed data analysis, the paper draws to the following conclusion: firstly, there are greatdifferences between the male and the female in their refusal strategies, female tend to use more indirect refusalstrategy and females are generally more polite and more euphemistic in refusal be more polite than male.Secondly, the female’s refusals usually adopt a combination of different refusal strategies, so they are rich andvaried in contents and forms. Generally speaking, the female’s refusals are more polite and interlocutor-oriented,while the male make more economical refusal. Thirdly, 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 choosereason/excuse/explanation as their best choice to refuse other people. But there some differences in the typesand percentage of occurrence of refusal strategies chosen by two genders. In the end of the thesis, the possiblecauses of gender differences in Chinese refusal speech acts are discussed, and these gender differences areperhaps due to some social and cultural factors.The research on speech acts from the social linguistic and cross-cultural communication perspectives,which is helpful to understand the human language performance and the corresponding strategy to use. Thisstudy is about the communicative competence of men and women, which has practical significance to a certaindegree for people to enhance verbal communication, to become aware of the cultural and gender differences, toavoid misunderstanding cross-gender communication and to promote harmonious social communication.