Requestive Speech Acts Realization Patterns: Observation from Persian

Members of a society use different strategies for international behaviors in their speech communities. Without knowing the speech act functions, it would be difficult to make correct requests in a language. Studies conducted pragmalinguistics have shown that conventionally direct and indirect requestive patterns are perceived differently in different speech communities. This study investigates the perception of the requestive speech acts by Persian native speakers to determine the socially appropriate requestive patterns in Persian. It also examines whether there is any relationship between the use of the requestive patterns and contextual factors, namely relative power, distance, and rank of imposition. To these ends a total of 24 situations designed in the form of a questionnaire were used for written elicitation. A random sample of 48 native Persian – speaking university students completed the questionnaire. Altogether 1148 requestive utterances were collected from the questionnaire. Each request comprised minimally a single main request strategy with(out) internal or external modifiers. The results show that Persian native speakers consider direct request strategy when accompanied with modifiers as an appropriate norm of making request in situations where interlocutors are socially intimate and where the speaker is more powerful than the hearer. On the basis of the results of the study, examining and investigating the notions of directness and appropriateness should be based on cultural norms and expectations as well as rational linguistic behavior.