Persian favor asking in formal and informal academic contexts: The impact of gender and academic status

Hooman Saeli

Abstract

The investigation of speech acts has been of interest, especially in cross-cultural pragmatics, to many L1/L2 researchers for many years (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). Favor-asking, as an important speech act, is centered upon having the other party of conversation do a specific act (Goldschmidt 1999). Although some research has been done on favor-asking in different contexts, studies on this speech act are still scarce, if any, in Persian settings. The main thrust of the current study was to investigate favor-asking among a sample of 20 native speakers of Persian (10 women and 10 men). The participants were selected from graduate students, since the employed oral DCT scenarios were designed to elicit favors asked from three different academic statuses: Higher, equal, and lower (professors, peers, and students, respectively). A total of 240 responses were then analyzed to identify the recurring patterns under the three open-coded categories of pre-favor, favor, and post-favor. The examination of the responses illustrated some variation triggered by gender and academic status differences, namely, the length of favors, frequency of some (sub)themes, and formality degree. Additionally, some relevant syntactic issues were explored (e.g. plural/singular pronouns/verbs), which contributed to the formality/informality of the favors, depending upon the contexts in which they were incorporated. Finally, some insights into Persian sociocultural interactions, favor-asking in particular, were provided.

Keywords:
Quick links
A browser-friendly version of this article is not yet available. View PDF
Allami, Hamid, and Amin Naeimi
(2011) A cross-linguistic study of refusals: An analysis of pragmatic competence development in Iranian EFL learners. Journal of Pragmatics 43.1: 385-406. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Babai, Homa, and Farzad Sharifian
(2013) Refusal strategies in L1 and L2: A study of persian-speaking learners of English. Multilingua 32.6: 801-836.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish
(1979) Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Bataineh, Ruba Fahmi, and Rula Fahmi Bataineh
(2006) Apology strategies of Jordanian EFL university students. Journal of Pragmatics 38.11: 1901-1927. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baxter, Leslie A
(1984) An investigation of compliance-gaining as politeness. Human Communication Research 10.3: 427-456. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beebe, Leslie. M., Tomoko Takahashi, and Robin Uliss-Weltz
(1990) Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals. In Robin C. Scarcella, Elaine Slosberg Andersen, and Stephen Krashen (eds.), Developing communicative competence in a second language. New York. NY: Newbury House, pp. 55-73.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Juliane House
(1989) Cross-cultural and situational variation in requestive behavior. In Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Cross-cultural pragmatics. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 123-154.Google Scholar
Bowe, Heather, and Kyle Martin
(2007) Communication across cultures: Mutual understanding in a global world. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
(1987) Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Rong, Lin He, and Chunmei Hu
(2013) Chinese requests: In comparison to American and Japanese requests and with reference to the “East-West divide”. Journal of Pragmatics 55: 140-161. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Andrew
(1995) Speech acts. In Sandra Lee McKay, and Nancy H. Hornberger (eds.), Sociolinguistics and language teaching. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 383-420. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coulmas, Florian
(1981) Poison to your soul: Thanks and apologies contrastively viewed. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational routine. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, pp. 69-91.Google Scholar
Eelen, Gino
(2001) A critique of politeness theories. Manchester: St. Jerome’s Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Eslamirasekh, Zohreh
(1993) A cross-cultural comparison of the requestive speech act realization patterns in Persian and English. In Lawrence F. Bouton, and Yamuna Kachru (eds.), Pragmatics and language learning, Monograph Series, Volume 4. Urbana, Champaign: University of Illinois, pp. 75-90.Google Scholar
Farnia, Maryam, Akbar Sohrabie, and Hiba Qusay Abdul Sattar
(2014) A pragmatic analysis of speech act of suggestion among Iranian native speakers of Farsi. Journal of ELT and Applied Linguistics (JELTAL) 2.2: 48-61.Google Scholar
Ghavamnia, Maedeh, Mansoor Tavakoli, and Mohsen Rezazadeh
(2012) A comparative study of requests among L2 English, L1 Persian, and L1 English speakers. RAEL: Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada 11: 105-123.Google Scholar
Goldschmidt, Myra M
(1998) Do me a favor: A descriptive analysis of favor asking sequences in American English. Journal of Pragmatics 29.2: 129-153. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Gonzales, Marti Hope, Julie Haugen Pederson, Debra J. Manning, and David W. Wetter
(1990) Pardon my gaffe: Effects of gender, status, and consequence severity on accounts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58.4: 610-621. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Martin S., and Solomon P. Shapiro
(1971) Indebtedness: An adverse aspect of asking for and receiving help. Sociometry 34.2: 290-301. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. Paul
(1975) Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3: Speech acts. New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 41-58.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet
(1989) Women’s and men’s apologies: Reflectors of cultural values. Applied Linguistics 10.2: 194-213. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006) Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics 38.1: 26-50. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Holtgraves, Thomas, and Joong-Nam Yang
(1992) Interpersonal underpinnings of request strategies: General principles and differences due to culture and gender. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62.2: 246-256. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Janney, Richard. W., and Horst Arndt
(1993) Universality and relativity in cross-cultural politeness research: A historical perspective. Multilingua 12.1: 13-50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H
(2009) Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory: The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics 41.8: 1611-1635. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Kazemi Zadeh Gol, Narges
(2013) A contrastive study of the speech act of refusal: Iranian ESL learners and native English speaking Americans. (Electronic Thesis or Dissertation). Retrieved from https://​etd​.ohiolink​.edu/
Keshavarz, Mohammad Hossein
(1988) Forms of address in post-revolutionary Iranian Persian: A sociolinguistic analysis. Language in Society 17.4: 565-575. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Koike, Dale
(1989) Pragmatic competence and adult L2 acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage. The Modern Language Journal 73.3: 279-289. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mao, LuMing Robert
(1994) Beyond politeness theory: ‘Face’ revisited and renewed. Journal of pragmatics 21.5: 451-486. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Shahrokhi, Mohsen, and Jariah Mohd
(2012) The realization of apology strategies among Persian males. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 46: 692-700. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, Helen
(2000) Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In: H. Spencer-Oatey (ed.), Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, pp. 11-46.Google Scholar
(2002) Managing interpersonal rapport: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 529-545. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard, Sachiko Ide, and Konrad Ehlich
(1992) Introduction. In Richard Watts, Sachiko Ide, and Konrad Ehlich (eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory, and Practice. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-17.Google Scholar
Yousefvand, Zohreh
(2010) Study of compliment speech act realization patterns across gender in Persian. Arizona Working Papers in SLA & Teaching 17: 91-112.Google Scholar
Yuan, Yi
(2001) An inquiry into empirical pragmatics data-gathering methods: Written DCTs, oral DCTs, field notes, and natural conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 33.2: 271-292. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar