Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization: The Case of Requests in the Persian and Turkish Speech of Iranian Speakers.
Mostafa Shahidi Tabar

Abstract
This study focuses on realization of requests made by Iranian Persian monolingual and Turkish-Persian bilingual speakers according to the directness categories introduced by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984). At first, a discourse completion test (DCT) was administered to both groups, in order to elicit requests in 10 different situations. Second, a politeness questionnaire was used to measure the perceived politeness in both bilingual and monolingual speakers. The results of the questionnaire showed that, politeness strategies are different in different languages in that, hints have been rated as being neutral area in Persian, but they tend to be close to the more polite area in Turkish in Iran. With regard to gender, a comparison reveals that, there are some differences in the use of certain strategies however, in case of requests, females use less direct strategies in Persian and more direct strategies in Turkish in comparison with males. Also this study also confirms that the socio-economic status of the interlocutors does not affect the kind of strategy used by the two groups.

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