The Aim of the Study

In order to establish the ways in which patterns of politeness differ from one language to another, we need to establish how different intra-cultural sources of variability (situational and individual) account for actual use in each language. Therefore, substansive claims about the universality or diversity of pragmatic principles across cultures and languages should await further research applied in as many new contexts as possible. The present study aims to be a contribution to such a challenge. It intends to extract and categorize the range of politeness strategies (positive politeness, negative politeness and off-record politeness) used by Persian mono-lingual speakers in certain situations and to compare and contrast them with those employed in English, based on the model proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987: pp102,131). More specifically this study addresses the following questions: 1. Do Farsi-speaking interlocutors follow the same politeness strategies mentioned in Brown and Levinsons model? 2. Does the sex of the interlocutors affect the kind of strategies used by the two groups (males and females)? 3. Does the socioeconomic status of the interlocutors affect the kind of strategies used by the two groups (low and high socio-economic status)? Socio-economic status is a subjective concept which can be defined differently by different researchers. In this study it is meant to refer to the job of the interlocutors father, the level of education, and the area of the interlocutors residence