A CONTRASTIVE STUDY ON SEMANTIC FORMULAS OF REFUSALS TO INVITATIONS BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE IN TERMS OF GENDER

Abstract

Refusals are speech acts occurring in our daily lives. In fact, choosing an appropriate strategy that is clever and effective is not simple because of many different factors including culture, gender, social status etc. This study aims to investigate gender and its effects on choosing the preferred strategies used by native speakers of American English and Vietnamese to refuse an invitation. 85 American English and 85 Vietnamese ones were asked to respond to three situations of refusing an invitation. The data, collected by means of a Discourse Completion Test from July 2021 to December 2021, were analyzed in terms of semantic formulas and were categorized according to the refusal taxonomy of Beebe et al. (1990). The findings show that participants differ in the ways they perform refusals. Besides, gender seems not to have much influence on choosing direct and indirect refusal strategies of invitations in both languages.