How Do Speech Acts Change with Regard to Gender of the Interlocutors?

Year 2021, Volume: 8 Issue: 3, 82 - 98, 30.10.2021

Ebru Boynuegri

Abstract

Gender differences in refusal strategies have long been investigated with regard to gender of the speakers, however, adopted strategies may change with regard to gender of the listener as well. Bearing this in mind, this qualitative study aimed to investigate gender differences in refusal strategies focusing both on the gender of the speaker and the listener. It further investigated how the strategies differed when responding to interlocutors of different power statuses. The participants of the study consisted of 13 female and 10 male students studying at the faculty of education at a foundation university in Turkey. The data was collected through a discourse completion test that included situations that were likely to be refused and were close to natural contexts. The discourse completion test was in Turkish, the data was collected in Turkish and analysed by the taxonomy developed by Beebe et al. (1990). The findings revealed that both female and male participants mainly used indirect strategies in their refusals, however, regardless of gender of the interlocutors, female participants used direct strategies less than male participants. In addition, regardless of the gender, female participants were more direct to equal-status interlocutors. Male participants, on the other hand, aligned their strategies with the gender of the listener; they were more direct to male interlocutors. Their directness of male participants was not affected by the higher status of the listener.

Keywords

speech acts, refusal strategies, gender differences, gender of the speaker

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