Abstract

This study investigates the comprehension of indirect request speech act used by Iranian people in daily
communication. The study is an attempt to find out whether different cultural backgrounds and the gender of the
speakers affect the comprehension of the indirect request of speech act. The sample includes thirty males and
females in Gachsaran(a city in the province of Kohgiloye va Boyerahmad in Iran) and thirty participants (males and
females) in Farokhshahr(a city in the province of Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari in Iran). A questionnaire is used to
elicit data related to the responses used by each group. The questionnaire consists of twenty situations. The
participants write their reaction to each situation. The results reveal that culture has significant effect on the
interpretation of indirect request of speech act. But gender doesn’t affect the comprehension of indirect request of
speech act.

Keywords: Cultural differences, Indirectness, Pragmatics, Request speech act, Speech acts (SA)

1. Introduction

According to Mey (1998) language is an inseparable part of our daily life. It is a tool used to transmit messages and
to communicate ideas, thoughts, and opinions. It is because of language that human being is situated in the society;
language is a social phenomenon which creates and determines our position in different kinds of social networks and
institutions. Culture is communication, and vice versa because it influences social practices in general, and discourse
in particular. Moreover, cultural factors play an important role in the development of diverse ways of talking and
communicating. It can be said that there exists a certain, rule-governed linguistic behavior such as thanking,
requesting and apologizing that allows us to deal with similar situations in similar ways across cultures (Mey, 1998).

People do not produce the grammatical utterances and words merely to express themselves; they perform actions via
these utterances. Semanticists and pragmatists have scrutinized different interpretations and uses of language. For
example, Koike (1989, p. 279) defines pragmatic competence as “the speaker's knowledge and use of rules of
appropriateness and politeness which indicate the way the speaker will understand and formulate speech acts
(SAs).” Obviously, communicative acts or SAs are among the most attractive areas in pragmatics and
sociolinguistics.

SAs are defined as acts performed by the speaker while making an utterance. The theory of SAs is a theory about
what people set out to accomplish when they choose to speak. Searl (1975), the American language philosopher,
believed that all linguistic communication involves linguistic SAs. According to Searl (1975) a language is
performing SAs such as making statement, giving command, asking question or making promises. Searle's approach
holds that SAs are only explained by special conventions that are neither semantic nor pragmatic (in the sense of
Grice's maxims of conversation).

Austin (1962) also studied the issue of SAs. He pointed out that people use language to achieve certain kinds of acts
generally recognized as SAs which are distinct from physical acts like drinking or mental acts like thinking. SAs are
divided into ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ SAs. Searle (1975) developed the idea of indirect SAs, where one SA is
performed via another, e.g., an utterance functioning as a statement on the surface can have an underlying function
of requesting in a given context. Austin (1962) introduced basic terms to study and distinguish locutionary,
illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. These three types of acts play an important role in understanding and
investigating direct and indirect SAs. In standard speech act account (Levinson, 1983), indirectness of SAs occurs
when a speaker uses an illocutionary force to indicate a different illocutionary force than the one intended. Searle
(1975) argued that what speakers try to communicate is their intention to do something.

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Evidently, understanding the motives behind utterances is often crucial to successful communication; nevertheless
the relationship between the surface of an utterance and its underlying meaning is not always straightforward.

Request is one type of SAs. A request is a speech act which expresses the speaker’s desire for the hearer to perform
an action with the added proviso that the hearer takes this expressed desire as the reason to act (Bach & Harnish,
1979). In fact, requests are performed by the speaker expressing for the addressee to do a particular thing and
usually aim for the addressee to intend to do it. Requesting occurs when the speaker’s utterance has the function of
attempting to obtain a specific piece of information. It is interesting to know that conventional indirect request may
be expressed as a question or an assertion. Wh-questions and how-questions are therefore considered as requesting
rather than questioning because they seek to obtain information rather than clarification.

The speakers and hearers must consider the context in which the SAs are uttered. Here, felicity conditions are very
important in order to “do thing with words” (Searl, 1975). It should be noted that in order for the SAs to be uttered,
certain conditions must be met. For example, in a context, sometimes an indirect request may be immediately
understood as a complaint. So, in this kind of indirect SAs, the listener must understand the exact meaning and
speaker’s intention to respond. Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that direct requests appear to be inherently
impolite and face-threatening because they intrude in the addressee’s territory. They point out that the preference for
polite behavior is its indirectness (see also Leech, 1983).

So the purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of gender on perception of indirect request of speech act.
Another objective of this study is to investigate if culture makes a statistically significant difference in
understanding the indirect request of speech act Therefore; the following research questions were posed:

1. Does culture affect the perception of the speech acts of indirect request?

2. Does gender affect the interpretation of the speech acts of indirect request?

Based on the above research questions, the following hypotheses were formulated:

1. Culture has no effect on the comprehension of the speech act of indirect request.

2. Gender has no effect on the comprehension of the speech act of indirect request in different cultures.

2. Review of the Literature

A speech act is an action performed by means of language. We perform SAs when we offer an apology, a greeting, a
request, a complaint, an invitation, a compliment, or a refusal (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969).

There are many utterances with the purpose of affecting the hearer in one way or another; some convey the
information directly, others are more careful or polite, and they use indirectness to transmit the message.
Indirectness is a widely used conversational strategy. People tend to use indirect SAs mainly in connection with
politeness (Leech, 1983, p. 108) since they thus diminish the unpleasant message contained in requests and orders
for instance. Politeness is not the only motivation for indirectness. “ People also use indirect strategies when they
want to make their speech more interesting, when they want to reach goals different from their partners or when they
want to increase the force of the message communicated” (Thomas, 1983, p. 143).

Requests are directed towards a listener to portray a speaker’s desire and intent for the listener to fulfill this desire
by offering information or action. There are two main types of requests: direct and indirect (Tsui, 1996, as cited in
Irawati, 2009). Direct requests, or imperatives, explicitly state the desired action, whereas indirect requests
implicitly state the desired action. There are several types of indirect requests: embedded imperatives– an action is
explicitly stated, question directives implicitly mention the desired action in question format need/want statements–
stated in terms of the speaker’s desires hints– and request a desired action in a hidden manner; suggestions– specify
that the speaker will join the listener in the desired action; and questions –request a desired action explicitly in a
questioning manner with questioning intonation which rises at the end ( Irawati, 2009).
Among the numerous SAs studied, requesting has continually been the focus for many decades because of both the
complexity of the relationship among form, meaning, and pragmatics in requests, and the high social stakes involved
for interlocutors when choosing among linguistic options ( Márquez – Réiter , 2002 ; Wierbzicka , 2003 ; Irawati ,
2009 ) . Zhang (1995) categorized requests in Chinese into two types: direct and indirect. Even direct one can be
viewed at different direct levels. She described indirectness in modern conversations between Chinese as being
“associated with information sequencing. The more one beats around the bush, the more indirect one’s speech
becomes” (1995, p. 82). Zhang’s study focused on the strategies used by adult speakers driven by politeness
concerns in order to redress face. She claimed that in Chinese culture, requests are often regarded as signs of a good
relationship and even respect.

Actually, the universality of an SA does not necessarily suggest a similarity in the form used to express the same
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For example, making the request in English is different from doing it in Persian. Requests have been mostly
investigated in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics (Deutschmann, 2003) to compare the use of request SA
between native English speakers and native speakers of other languages like Chinese (Sheer &Chen, 2003), Arabic
(Al-khateb, 2009), and Persian (Jalilifar, 2009).

Classical SAs theory defined apologizing and requesting as a culture-sensitive ‘speech-act set’ (Olshtain & Cohen,
1983) of semantic formulae or strategies being relevant to a felicitous performance of these two kinds of SAs. Such
a model was proposed by Cohen and Olshtain (1981) (derived from Fraser, 1981) and later developed (both for
apologies and requests) by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) and by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) into the CCSARP
(Cross-cultural study of SA realization patterns) project. Most of these cross-cultural studies have been carried out
within CCSARP project “to compare across languages the realization patterns of two SAs– requests and apologies–
and to establish the similarities and differences between native and nonnative speakers’ realization patterns in these
two acts” (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984, p. 196).

Gender affects the perception of direct and indirect SAs. Several studies suggest that females are prone to produce
indirect SAs and males direct (Mckelvie, 2000; Mulac, Bradac, & Gibbons, 2001). These studies have examined
how different genders comprehend indirect SAs. Tannen (1994) has compared gender differences in language as
more similar to ‘cultural’ differences (“cultural difference approach”). Comparing conversational goals, she argued
that men have a report style, aiming to communicate factual information, whereas women have a rapport style, more
concerned with building and maintaining relationships. Such differences are pervasive across media, including face-
to-face conversation. Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender differences tend to
be most pronounced in single-gender groups. One explanation for this is that people accommodate their language
towards the style of the person they are interacting with. An important observation is that this accommodation is
usually towards the language style, not the gender of the person. That is, a polite and empathic male will tend to be
warmed up to on the basis of their being polite and empathic, rather than their being male.

3. Methodology

3.1 Participants

At the beginning of the study, the participants in this study were 60 randomly-selected ordinary people who were
selected from different social classes with different educational levels. Oxford Placement Test was used to select
participants (OPT).Since the objectives of this study were first to compare gender and then cultures, 30 males and 30
females were selected. Of these 60 people 15 males and 15 females were from Gachsaran, a city in Kohgiloye va
Boyerahmad Province, their native language is Turkish, and 15 males and 15 females were from Farokhshahr, a city
in the Province of Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari, their native language is Farsi. Their age ranged between 19 and 26.
Then they were divided into four groups as follows: Group 1, 15 females from Gachsaran; Group 2, 15 Males from
Gachsaran; Group 3, 15 females from Farokhshahr; and Group 4, 15 males from Farokhshahr. After collecting the
questionnaires it was found out that only 55 people completed them: 14 females from Gachsaran, 13 females from
Farokhshahr, 13 males from Gachsaran, and 15 males from Farokhshahr.

3.2 Materials

The materials for this study consisted of a questionnaire in Farsi which included 20 items. The questionnaire was
prepared in Farsi because the main factor of the study was culture not his or her language and the researcher wanted
to make the same situation for all participants. All Turkish participants can speak Farsi and Turkish but the
participants of Farokhshahr can speak only Farsi. All these items prompted an indirect request which had to be
provided by the respondents. In the questionnaire a situation was briefly described in which an indirect request was
implied, and the respondents were expected to understand the request and provide the best answers for the
situations.

The instruction of the questionnaire asked the respondents (in Farsi) to read the situations carefully and write down
the action which comes to their mind for each item.

3.3 Reliability and validity of the study

The researcher used the questionnaire of the study after showing it to four instructors at Azad University of
Khourasgan, and two experienced English teachers. They suggested some changes on some of the items in the
questionnaire. For example, the situation of each item must be described exactly that the participants comprehend
each situation correctly. According to their suggestions some items were added and some of them omitted

3.4 Procedures

In order to gather the necessary information, a questionnaire with 20 situations was prepared. Then 60 copies of the
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questionnaires were distributed among the randomly selected ordinary people to fill. They were given the necessary
information regarding the reason and the way to fill them; they were given half a day to complete the questionnaire;
in other words, the questionnaires were distributed in the morning and were collected in the afternoon. The reason
for this was that some of them were busy doing their work and needed some free time to do the task; therefore, this
researcher decided to let them fill the questionnaires during their lunch break.

The data obtained from the questionnaire were quantified. After the questionnaires were collected; the answers were
analyzed and the degree of frequency of each group was measured. The degree of frequency regarding to the age
and culture of participants was measured.

3.5 Statistical procedures

To compare the results of different groups with each other, by using SPSS software, the degree of frequency was
measured and Chi-square test was calculated. There were four groups involved in the study and two independent
variables, namely, gender and culture.

4. Results

4.1 Testing the first hypothesis

In order to test the first hypothesis, which tried to find out cultural differences regarding indirect request, 55
questionnaires were gathered, 27 participants (both male and female) from Gachsaran and 28 participants (both male
and female) from Farokhshahr answered the items on the questionnaires. The degree of frequency of each group was
calculated. Table 1 presents the degree of frequency in interpretation of indirect request of SA in two different cities.
Figure 1 illustrates the frequency graphically.

By referring to Table 1 one can see that the rate of frequency of the two cultures is different. In order to find out
whether this difference is statistically significant or not the Chi-Square test was used. Table 2 reveals the results of
the Chi-Square tests.

As it is clear in Table 2 the amount of Chi-Square in the test is low enough, that is, smaller than the statistical scale
at significance level of .05(α=0.05). The level of significance in this test is .001, which is lower than 0.05. In other
words, the difference between the two cultures under investigation is statistically significant. Therefore, the first
hypothesis stating that culture has no effect on comprehension of the SA of indirect request is rejected, and it can be
claimed that culture has a significant effect on comprehending the SA of indirect request. According to the analyzed
data, the degree of politeness of participants showed that the participants of Gachsaran responded more politely than
the participants of Farokhshahr. So we can say the culture has an effect on comprehension of indirect request of SA,
and the reactions of participants in different situations differ based in their cultures.

4.2 Testing the second hypothesis

The number of the participants for gender was 27 for females and 28 for males. Table 3 shows the degree of
frequency in interpretation of indirect request of SA according to the gender of participants.

As can be seen in Table 3 and Figure 2 that the degrees of frequency of the two groups are not very different. In
order to understand if this difference is statistically significant or not, the Chi-Square tests were used. Table 4,
shows the results of Chi-Square tests.

According to Table 4, the number obtained by the amount of Chi-Square is not high enough to be considered
significant. In other words, it is only significant at the significance level of .789 which is higher than the agreed
significance level of .05. Therefore, the second hypothesis which stated that gender has no effect on the
comprehension of the SA of indirect request in different cultures is retained. It means that gender does not have any
effect on comprehending the SA of indirect request. As data show, females were more polite than males in the two
different cities. According to Figure 2 females' responses in Gachsaran were more polite than those of females who
lived in Farokhshahr.

All in all, with regard to the findings of this study the first hypotheses was rejected, but the second hypothesis was
supported.