The speech act of refusal is an undesirable speech act that can cause negative emotions in the interlocutor and requires mitigation tools in order to maintain effective and conflict-free communication. The mitigation tools are seen as acts or pragmatic moves that accompany refusal to communicatively support the addressee and, taken as a whole, form a speech genre. Like other speech acts and genres, refusal has ethnocultural specificities, which if ignored can lead to sociopragmatic failures in intercultural communication.