A Study of the Structure of Telephone Conversation Opening in Persian

The present study aims to investigate the structure of telephone conversation opening in Persian, on the basis of Schegloff (1968). Accordingly, it attempts to investigate the structure of telephone conversation opening in this language, to contrast Persian and English in this regard and finally, to consider the influence of familiarity of the speakers and their gender on such a structure in Persian. Related data were collected from conversations among 54 female and male 20-65 year old Persian speakers. The results show that, although the structure of telephone conversation opening in Persian follows the model under study, to some extent, considerable cross-cultural differences are also at work. It was also concluded that the degree of familiarity of the interlocutors and their gender has an inevitable impact on the intonation pattern, the utterance selected by them and the extension of greetings.