Authors : Parisa Abdolrezapour and Abbass Eslami-Rasekh
Abstract: This study aims to study politeness levels of various forms of requests in English as perceived and judged by EFL Persian students and American native speakers. Based on the role plays conducted in American context, a questionnaire of politeness was constructed containing 18 requests in three different situations (i.e., requesting the professor to speak louder, asking the student to give his lecture sooner and finally asking another student for a pen). Each participant was asked to rank each request on a range of 10 levels of politeness. Subject's perception of politeness was compared according to their native language. Data collected from 65 students showed that there were differences in perception of politeness between the two cultures. The findings generally confirmed Lakoff's basic order of Imperative/Declarative/Interrogative mood which means in making requests imperatives are less polite than declaratives and declaratives are in terms less polite than interrogatives.
Parisa Abdolrezapour and Abbass Eslami-Rasekh, 2010. A Cross-Cultural Study of Perception of Politeness by Iranian and American in Request Forms. Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences, 7: 164-169.