Abstract

This paper examines refusal strategies employed in invitations and requests used by Saudi and American female students. As speakers’ performances in refusals vary, the paper investigates the content of the semantic formulas and their frequencies in the speech acts of these females when interacting with different interlocutors of different statuses. The assumption proposed in this paper is that speech acts reflect the cultural norms and values of speakers from different cultures (e.g., Arabs’ collectivist culture vs American individualistic culture). The analysis and description of refusal strategies are motivated by the need to provide new information on how native speakers really use language, rather than how we think they perform such acts. Data collected in this paper is based on speech acts of refusals employed by a sample of Saudi and American female students.

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