Decline to Purchase Superfluous Goods: A Perspective on Refusal Strategies Used by Iranians in Shopping Context

The aim of this study which has been conducted in a monolingual and mono-cultural settingwith regard to Persian language is to shed light on how native speakers of Persian use thespeech act of refusal in shopping contexts where they decline to purchase a product thesalesperson attempts to sell. Data were obtained through a discourse completion test (DCT)from 30 female and 30 male participants which were randomly selected. The DCT includedeight hypothetical shopping situations. The collected data were analyzed based coding systemdeveloped by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990). Findings indicated that both malesand females utilize a variety of direct, indirect, and adjuncts to refusals where they areunwilling to purchase a product and the salesperson attempts to persuade them to.

Keywords:

speech acts , refusals , adjuncts to refusals