Delving into Speech Act of Requests of Iranian Turkish Informants

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the notion of indirectness in the speech act of requests among native speakers of Iranian Turkish. 180 respondents took a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with ten scenarios, and returned 1800 requestive speech acts. The acts were then analyzed according to the directness categories introduced by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984) and politeness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987). Results, after analyses of the data indicated that Blum-Kulka's scale and Brown and Levinson's classification are not complete to measure all the responses made by this study informants. There seems to be a considerable number of informants who have deliberately chosen strategies which are not in Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) and Brown and Levinson (1987). At the end, a finer scale has been introduced by the authors to overcome the mentioned shortcomings.