The Relationship of the Type and Number of Impoliteness Strategies Employed by Sistani Students with Addressee`s Power and Gender

Linguistic impoliteness phenomenon has been the subject of a good number of studies in recent years. Different scholars have approached it from different perspectives and proposed different models and definitions. Culpeper (1996) has described impoliteness as the parasite of politeness and that is why he has formed his impoliteness strategies in relation to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. The present study is intended to investigate the usage of impoliteness strategies employed by Sistani students in the realization of request speech act. To this end, a number of requests were collected through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The data were gathered according to the Culpeper`s (1996) impoliteness framework. The analysis of data shows that: 1) both male and female subjects tend to be more negatively impolite in the realization of request speech act, 2) the addressee`s power affects addresser`s use of impoliteness strategies in terms of the choice and frequency of the strategies employed; and 3) the addressee`s gender does not affect addresser`s use of impoliteness strategies in terms of the choice and frequency of the strategies employed.