Chinese females׳ date refusals in reality TV shows: Expressing involvement or independence?

- The paper investigated Chinese females׳ date refusals in reality TV shows.
- Chinese females demonstrated a preference for strategies of involvement face in their date refusals.
- The Chinese females employed a limited range of pragmatic strategies in their date refusals.
- The study contributes to the existing literature on Chinese refusals and gendered language.

The majority of pragmatics research on the speech act of refusals has employed production questionnaires or role-plays to elicit data. Research employing more naturalistic data is needed to explore the actual performance of refusals, particularly in those socially sensitive contexts such as date refusals and within a public domain such as the reality TV show. The present study investigates the under-researched topic of date refusals on reality TV shows in China. The corpus in the present study comprised 38 female date refusals collected from a popular Chinese TV dating programme over a year. It was found that when refusing a date invitation in the TV show, Chinese females employed a limited range of pragmatic strategies. Their date refusals were mostly realized by means of apologies, and reasons, and to a lesser degree through adjuncts to refusals (including positive comments and gratitude) and direct refusal strategies. In addition, the Chinese females demonstrated a preference for strategies of involvement politeness in their date refusals. The paper also discusses the possible impact of the genre of reality TV shows on the Chinese females date refusals.