PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE: REFUSAL SPEECH ACT BY IRANIAN STUDENTS IN SWEDEN

Abstract: Understanding cross-cultural differences plays a crucial role in communication and successful cross-cultural communications depends on various factors such as pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. Many researchers focus more on the aspect of pragmatics such as speech acts. The present study is a contrastive study of refusal speech act. The aim of this study is to investigate the pragmatic transfer in the speech act of refusal and then find similarities and differences between the speech acts of refusal in response to an invitation, request, offer and suggestion in various social contexts in two languages and cultures. This study was conducted by Iranian students in Gothenburg who utilize both Persian as their first language and English as their second language. 24 Iranian students completed a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that included 12 situations by submitting written refusals to 3 invitations, 3 requests, 3 offers and 3 suggestions. The data were then coded based on the classification of refusal speech act by Beebe et al. (1990). The results were compared with the results of another study in which Iranian students were compared with 10 American native speakers of English cited in Abed’ study (2011). The results show that in terms of frequency of refusal strategies, both Iranian students and American native speakers of English like to utilize more indirect refusal strategies. The Iranian female students utilized more refusal strategies to show more politeness than the Iranian male students. Furthermore, analysis revealed that both Iranian male students and Iranian female students utilized address terms and that the Iranian female students utilized religious expressions while the Iranian male students did not.