Abstract :
This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the notion of indirectness in the speech act of requests among native speakers of Persian across different levels of Perceived Situational Seriousness. 372 respondents took a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with six scenarios ranging from formal to informal degrees of Perceived Situational Seriousness (PSS), and returned 2232 Requestive Speech Acts (RSAs). The acts were then analyzed according to models proposed by Blum-Kulka, et al. (1989), and Scollon and Scollon (2001). Results, after analysis of the data, indicated that, in general, native speakers of Persian prefer conventionally indirect (CI) strategies when issuing requests. Social distance was found to trigger indirectness in requestive speech acts (RSAs); solidarity was found to enhance addressorsʹ inclination towards directness in RSAs. It was further noticed that pragmatic knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the world and of each other that interlocutors share) resulted in Persian native speakersʹ inclination towards NCI strategies in RSAs.
