A Pragmatic Study Of Gender Differences In Refusal Strategies In Love Movies

Refusal is a frequently used speech act in communication, which isgenerally regarded as a speech act that the speaker denies to engage in anaction proposed by the interlocutor. For its face-threatening nature, itrequires that the speaker should adopt various polite refusal strategies tosave hearer’s face so as to maintain a harmonious relationship. Therefore,it is necessary for different genders to employ appropriate refusalstrategies. However, many researchers are confined to study refusalspeech act from the perspective of cross-cultural comparison rather thanfrom the pragmatic perspective of gender. Language and gender has along history that many significant researches and studies have been doneto investigate gender difference in language use. They noticed that menand women tended to employ different styles of speech acts according todifferent cultural and social factors. As one of the important speech act, itis necessary to investigate gender differences in employing refusalstrategies. The thesis tries to do gender-based refusal strategies frompragmatic perspective.The author collects data by means of four love movies as well asapplies both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze differentrefusal strategies used by men and women with detailed examples. Somepossible factors, which may cause gender differences in choosing refusalstrategies, will be also mentioned in the thesis. Additionally, under theguidance of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Leech’s Politeness Principleand Brown&Levinson’s Face Theory, the author tries to exploresimilarities and differences between men and women in employing therefusal strategies from pragmatic perspective. According to the research,some questions are going to be solved, which include: Do men and women adopt different refusal strategies in love movies? What are thedifferences of men and women’s refusal strategies in love movies? Whatpossible factors may influence men and women in choosing differentrefusal strategies after an analysis of the four love movies?By the results of the research, the findings are significant: on onehand, the findings of the research will be helpful in understandingcross-gender communication and improving the communication skillsbetween different genders. On the other hand, it reminds people toemploy appropriate means to save the face of the communication partnerswhile trying to refuse others, which will make the communicationsmoothly. Additionally, this research is one of the rare studies on genderdifferences in performing refusal strategies from pragmatic perspective,which might make a supplement for gender differences in language use aswell as shed light on pragmatics and linguistic interaction.The author sincerely hopes this research will have certain value tosome researchers who study gender differences in employing refusalstrategies in the future.