Different Genders, Different Refusals——A Sociolinguistic Study Of Gender Differences In Refusal Speech Act

Refusal is a kind of speech act which is usually used in people’s daily life. When facing offer, invitation, request or suggestion from others, people always have to make negative responses to the others’ speech acts, which are called refusal speech acts. Since the refusal speech act inevitably threatens the positive face or negative face of the interlocutors, it is seen as a kind of face-threatening act. People always try to employ all kinds of refusal strategies so as to mitigate the degree of face-threatening. However, because of the physiological and psychological differences as well as the influence of social factors, there exist significant differences between males and females when they make refusal speech acts. Based on the Face Theory, Speech Act Theory and Gender Theory, this thesis makes a detailed analysis of differences of refusal strategies between two genders and discusses the reasons which cause those differences.The study makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the refusal speech acts which are naturally expressed in daily life. Through watching the TV variety shows and noting down the refusals in them, the author collects100refusal speech acts separately used by each gender. Based on the taxonomy of refusal strategies proposed by Beebe et al, the study separately makes a statistical analysis of the100refusals used by each gender and then makes a comparison of the strategies adopted by males and females. In addition, a contrastive analysis is also conducted to investigate the gender differences of refusal strategies applied after four kinds of eliciting speech acts which include offer, invitation, request and suggestion. Finally, this thesis discusses and explains the underlying reasons for the gender differences from three aspects including physiological factor, psychological factor and social factor.Through the contrastive analysis and discussion, the study concludes that:both genders tend to adopt indirect refusal strategies than direct ones when making refusals; however, males use comparatively more direct strategies than females; besides, in a single refusal speech act, females always employ a combination of several refusal strategies while the strategies used by males are comparatively simple; furthermore, the orders of refusal strategies chosen by males and females are also different. These conclusions show that in daily communications, both genders tend to maintain faces of the two sides, especially the face of the addressee and they all try their best to mitigate the degree of face threatening to the lowest; nevertheless, females are more euphemistic and more polite compared with males.The underlying reasons for the gender differences in refusal speech act are listed as follows:firstly, the physiological distinctions cause the behavior differences of males and females substantially; secondly, there exist a number of differences in the psychology and characteristics between two genders which results in their differences when making refusals; thirdly, both genders are brought up in different subcultures and people in society also have different expectations of them; therefore, each gender has their own characteristics in behavior and language style.This study can help people have a better understanding of the gender differences in refusal speech acts, and meanwhile help to improve the effectiveness of language communication. In addition, it is hoped that this thesis can be helpful to the research of gender differences in language and can give inspiration to and reference for future relevant study.