Gender Differences In Speech Act Of Refusal Performed By Chinese College Students

"Refusal" is an important linguistic phenomenon in everyday communication and it is also a very common and sensitive speech act among people.From the perspective of linguists,refusal is also viewed as a "face-threatening act".In the actual communication process,people inevitably encounter situations where they need to refuse others.Therefore,how to refuse others is of importance to everyone.Although studies on refusal speech acts have emerged one after another,most of them are drawn from the perspectives of cultural contrast or second language acquisition.There is less study on refusal strategies from the perspective of gender difference in refusals,especially under the Chinese context.Research participants are Chinese college students,and the data are collected by combining the discourse completion test(DCT)questionnaire.In this research,there are two groups of subjects(total 70): 35 females and 35 males.These participants are all sophomore students from 19 to 23 years old in Qinggong College,North China University of Science and Technology.After the questionnaire survey,the author interviewed the research participants to supplement the data collected.In this paper,the author used SPSS software to conduct a chi-square test on the collected data.The research results showed that there were gender differences between male and female students in the refusal speech act.Firstly,females are politer and more euphemistic than males when they refuse others.Females use more address words,modal words and auxiliary speech acts than males.Also,among the refusal strategies utilized,females not only used more total refusal strategies than males,but also used more types of refusal strategies.The author hopes that this study can help people better understand the gender differences of refusal speech acts between male and female college students under the Chinese context and the causes,reduce the misunderstanding of transgender communication and achieve better communication goals.Figure 12;Table 6;Reference 53...