POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN MAKING REQUEST IN BRITISH AND PERSIAN FAMILY DISCOURSE

Despite universal character of Politeness from many viewpoints, numerous cross-cultural studies approve that there are different understandings of politeness and different norms of politeness among cultures [Larina 2015, Leech 2005, Leech & Larina 2014, Sifianou 1992]. The purpose of the study is to scrutinize how British and Persian cultural values construct the style of interpersonal interaction in family setting. We aimed at analysing the politeness norms and strategies with drawing on the speech act of making request as a routine speech act in daily interaction. The material for study was extracted from a discourse completion test (DCT), answered by 112 of British and Persian objects and our ethnographic observations. Our findings confirm that the style of interaction between parents and children in British context is perfectly egalitarian. Meanwhile, in Persian culture, there are considerable distinctions between the communicative styles in top-down (parent to children) and bottom-up (children to parents) contexts.