Intensification of Apology Strategies in Persian: A Politeness Perspective

This paper is an endeavor to investigate whether apology supportive intensification is motivated by contextual variables in Persian. In this respect, the relevant apology speech acts were collected through the administration of a Discourse Completion Test consisting of situations which varied in terms of Social Dominance, Social Distance, and Severity of Offence. The elicited data was analyzed and codified according to a coding scheme developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). The results indicated that participants’ assessment of contextual variables motivated the strategy they used as apology supportive intensifications. Moreover, the study identified the use of culture specific strategies as far as apology speech act supportive intensifications are concerned.