Comparison of Korean and Turkish refusal speech acts

When people communicate with each other, they aim not only to exchange information but also to make an impact on the hearer. Austin (2020), who developed the speech act theory, revealed that functions such as declaring and describing are only a part of the language, and at the same time, things can be done with words. Refusal speech acts have a face-threatening feature and are used in different ways depending on factors such as social status, age, and gender. Thus, when the act of refusal is not performed properly, it may negatively affect interpersonal relations. In this thesis, refusals used in Korean and Turkish are discussed in terms of speech act theory. The data for the Korean and Turkish refusal speech acts was obtained by analyzing the dialogues of Korean and Turkish TV series, which are "Good Doctor (굿 닥터 /gus dag-teo/)", "Crash Landing On You (사랑의 불시작 /sa-lang-ui bul-si-jag/)", "Mucize Doktor" which is the spin-off of the Korean TV series "Good Doctor (굿 닥터 /gus dag-teo/)" and "Leyla ile Mecnun". The data obtained from the analysis were compared using the "contrastive functional analysis" method in Chesterman (1998), and the similarities and differences between the Korean and Turkish reject verbs were presented. The frequency of refusal strategies in Korean and Turkish and their usage rates depending on hierarchical relationships was presented. In addition, at the end of the data analysis, three new refusal strategies not mentioned in the literature were suggested. Keywords: Korean, refusal, speech act, pragmatics