Exploring (Im)Politeness Strategies in Indirect Reports in Persian across Genders

Abstract

Politeness and impoliteness strategies create a vital social practice in our daily and professional interactions. Being once an issue in the code of conduct protocols, (im)politeness nowadays marks an interdisciplinary scientific field. Regarding this importance, this study explored the politeness and impoliteness strategies used in changing direct speech to indirect speech among male and female Persian speakers. Eighty Iranian Persian speakers (36 males and 44 females) were given a discourse completion task. Brown and Levinson’s taxonomy of politeness strategies and Culpeper’s impoliteness taxonomy were used to analyze the sample. The findings revealed that the propositional content of a direct speech was maintained in the indirect speech in Persian with different attitudinal manners. The results also demonstrated a significant difference between the male and female participants in terms of impoliteness indirect strategies; however, there was no significant difference between them on the output strategies. Additionally, the results revealed that the most frequent politeness strategies used by Persian speakers included positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record, and bold on-record, respectively. The implications of the current research may lead to a deeper and greater understanding of the role of politeness strategies applied in language learning and teaching in EFL contexts.