This study explores developmental patterns in Greek FL learners' skills to refuse a request. Despite a lot of development with expanding proficiency, even the advanced learners’ output lags far behind native speakers' one in various ways. The study also examines the influence of both grammatical development and sociocultural knowledge on these learners’ evolving capacity to effectuate refusals. Finally, it is proposed that the developmental stages of pragmatic competence presented in the literature with respect to other speech acts and particularly requests can also be effectual for the development of refusals.