Gender Characteristics In Date Invitation

Refuse speech act has been studied endlessly since 1990s.Refuse is an“uncooperative”response to request,invitation,and so forth,and it is a“face-threatening”act as well.As the refusal speech act is highly sensitive and threatening to listener’s face,the performance of refuse is a tricky problem.This paper collected 200refusals from two domestic dating programs（You Are the One and You Are the Perfect）and investigated the frequency and realization of different refusal strategies,gender differences in stance markers of refusals,and the characteristics of date invitation-refusal sequence organization.The results showed that both men and women used more indirect refusal strategies and they often used“reason”to perform refuse,such as“Our personalities are inappropriate”or“I don’t think I have a crush on you”.Besides,it was found that there was no significant gender difference in stance markers of refusals between two groups,and“self-mention”was the most frequently used markers in both groups.Finally,in date invitation-refusal sequence,“the first pair part-the second pair part（FS）”and“the first pair part-the second pair part-minimal post-expansion（FSc₁）”were the most frequently used variations in If You Are the One,while“pre-expansion-the first pair part-the second pair part-nonminimal post-expansion（a FSc₂）”and“the first pair part-the second pair part-nonminimal post-expansion（FSc₂）”were the most frequent variations in If You Are the Perfect.Moreover,boys rarely initiated invitation again after being rejected and they would use“ok/well”or“thank you”to end the sequence,but some girls still initiated invitation again after being rejected and formed“non-minimal post-expansion”to continue the sequence.The findings of this study could provide some references for second language learning and teaching.