Gli atti del rifiuto nel teatro di Eduardo De Filippo (studio pragmatico) / Speech acts of refusal in the the theater of Eduardo De Filippo (pragmatic study)

Abstract

This study aims to examine the refusal strategies in Four Plays by Eduardo De Filippo: Ditegli sempre di sì, Il cilindro, Il contratto and Gli esami non finiscono mai. we realized that there are no Italian studies that investigate the speech acts of refusal in the theater, to the best of our knowledge. The speech act of refusal was, instead, an object of contrastive studies that aim to highlight the similarities and/or differences between the refusal strategies performed by different speakers, both native and non-native. The introduction presents the objectives and importance of the study. In the theoretical framework we referred to the speech act theory, as emerges from the works of Austin and Searle, and to the typology of refusals proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). Then we classified the acts of refusal collected from the corpus, we calculated the frequency of refusal strategies according to direct and indirect strategies, and the effect of interlocutor sex on strategy use. The conclusions include the study results.