ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
Expressing ‘no’ is by no means a simple act. In a multicultural and gendered society such as Malaysia, the speech act of refusal is realised in a multitude of ways across ethnic groups as well as gender types. This paper investigated the refusal strategies of Malay male and female students in a Malaysian public university. The research participants consisted of 15 Malay male and 15 female undergraduates who were asked to complete a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The DCT contains nine authentic real-world contexts; designed to elicit genuine and spontaneous responses from the respondents. The data was then analysed in accordance to Beebe, Takahashi & Uliss-Weltz (1990) semantic formula taxonomy. The findings revealed that indirect refusal is the predominant strategy employed by both male and female participants; with the choice of refusal being negative willingness ability. However, the male participants utilised direct refusal strategies more frequently than their female counterpart. Despite the small sample size, specified participants’ age range and singular setting, this preliminary study sets fresh impetus on investigating the cultural dynamics underscoring Malay community refusal pattern. Empirical exploration of this nature could be expanded to other gender-oriented multicultural communities as it is pivotal in mitigating and dissuading miscommunication stemming from the rich diversity.
Abdul Sattar, H. Q., Che Lah, S., & Raja Suleiman, R. R. (2012). Refusal strategies in English by Malay university students. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 11(3).
Al-Mahrooqi, R., & Al-Aghbari, K. (2016). Refusal Strategies Among Omani EFL Students. SAGE Open, 6(4), 2158244016672907.
Al-Shboul, Y., Maros, M., & Yasin, M. S. M. (2012). An intercultural study of refusal strategies in English between Jordanian EFL and Malay ESL postgraduate students. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature®, 18(3).
Amirrudin, S., & Salleh, N. B. Refusal Strategies in English Among Malay ESL Students. Research Journal, 30.
Asmah, A. (1996). Going Glocal: Cultural dimensions in Malaysian management. Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Institute of Management.
Azwan, A. (2018). Politeness Strategies Of Refusals To Requests By Ambonese Community. LINGUA: Journal of Language, Literature and Teaching, 15(1), 1-6.
Beebe, L. M., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1990). Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals. Developing communicative competence in a second language, 5573.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Vol. 4). Cambridge university press.
Farnia, M., & Wu, X. (2012). An intercultural communication study of Chinese and Malaysian university students’ refusal to invitation. International Journal of English Linguistics, 2(1), 162
Flor, A. M., & Juan, E. U. (2011). Research methodologies in pragmatics: eliciting refusals to requests. Elia: Estudios de lingüística inglesa aplicada, (11), 47-88.
Goffman, E. (1957). Alienation from interaction. Human relations, 10(1), 47-60.
Hedayatnejad, F., & Rahbar, B. The Effect of Gender on Realization of Refusal of Suggestion in Formal and Informal Situations among Iranian EFL Learners.
Hei, K. C. (2009). Moves in Refusal: How Malaysians Say'No.'. China Media Research, 5(3).
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language (Vol. 626). Cambridge university press.
Hudson, T., Brown, J. D., & Detmer, E. (1995). Developing prototypic measures of cross-cultural pragmatics (Vol. 7). National Foreign Language Resource Center.
Jerome, C. (2013). The complexity of Malay Muslim identity in Dina Zaman’s I am Muslim. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 13(2).
Kreishan, L. (2018). Politeness and Speech acts of Refusal and Complaint among Jordanian Undergraduate Students. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 7(4), 68-76.
Lakoff, R. (1973). Language and woman's place. Language in society, 2(1), 45-79.
Leaper, C., & Robnett, R. D. (2011). Women are more likely than men to use tentative language, aren’t they? A meta-analysis testing for gender differences and moderators. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 35(1), 129-142.
Lee, C. (2016). Understanding refusal style and pragmatic competence of teenage Cantonese English learners in refusals: An exploratory study. Intercultural Pragmatics, 13(2), 257-282.
Lim, B. S. (2017). Malay sayings as politeness strategies. Journal of Modern Languages, 15(1), 65-79.
Mansor, N. Z., Othman, Z., Yaacob, M. J., & Yasin, M. A. M. (2016). Validation of Malay gender role conflict scale for adolescents. International Medical Journal, 23(3), 219-221.
Meier, A. J. (1995). Defining politeness: Universality in appropriateness. Language Sciences, 17(4), 345- 356.
Radhiah, I. (2017). The Difference of Speech Act of Refusal Strategies between the Malays and Spanish: Cross-Cultural Studies. The Social Sciences, 12(8), 1334-1343.
Shamshudeen, R. I., & Morris, B. (2014). ‘No hugging please, we are Muslims’: Akademi Fantasia, Malay television audiences and the negotiation of global popular cultural forms. Asian Journal of Communication, 24(2), 142-157.
Shishavan, H. B., & Sharifian, F. (2016). The refusal speech act in a cross-cultural perspective: A study of Iranian English-language learners and Anglo-Australian speakers. Language & Communication, 47, 75-88.
In-Text Citation: (Raslie & Azizan, 2018)
To Cite this Article: Raslie, H. B., & Azizan, A. B. (2018). Refusals in the Malay Culture: Gender Differences in Focus. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 8(12), 1947–1959.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode