The Refusal Strategies in Kurdish Culture with Reference to English

A Socio-Pragmatic Study

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The present study aims at investigating the refusal strategies employed in Kurdish culture, with a specific focus on the influence of social status and gender on the selection of the refusal strategies toward the requests and the invitations. The study follows a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approach to collect and analyze the achieved data. The data was gathered through a discourse completion task containing four hypothetical scenarios in which each of them were designed to indicate responses across a set of various social roles. The findings of the Kurdish refusals are then compared to the American English refusals to determine the cross-cultural similarities and the difference between the two cultures. The findings of the study revealed that the Kurdish people have a predominant favor for the employment of the indirect refusal strategies, specifically reason strategy, which is the most utilized strategy. The direct strategy of non-performative was the second most utilized refusal tactic that was followed to refuse the interlocutors of either lower [equal, low] social status or same gender. More importantly, the findings indicate the fact that the social status and gender considerably influence on the Kurdish refusal strategies which was confirmed to influence the American refusals as well. The two cultures of Kurdish and American share many similarities, despite differences in terms of the specification of the responses.