Selection of the Request Speech Act Strategies in Kurdish Regarding two Social Factors: Gender and Power

This research, conducted in the field of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, aims at the describing and analyzing the type and number of request strategies in Kurdish, Mokri dialect, regarding the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of social factors as the gender of user and the power of addressee. To this end, for data collection, a revised version of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) including 12 situations was distributed among 130 (65 males and 65 females) Mokri Kurdish speakers in Mahabad city located in the southern of West Azabayejan province. They were in the age range of 25 to 35, holding at least a bachelor degree. Besides the questionaire, direct observation consisting of 7 hours of everyday normal conversations in various situations and different contexts was employed to collect more natural and reliable data. As the main theoretical framework for the present study, Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) coding scheme used by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) was employed and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory was used as the peripheral framework. Results of the research showed a significant difference across genders in selection of the type of request strategis and the power of addressee had a significant effect on choosing the strategies. It was also shown that power and gender had an interactive effect on the selection of these strategies. According to supporting strategies of the "negative and positive faces" in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory, it was found that Kurdish people as the members of one cooperative group mostly employed positive face saving acts in their communications and interactions. The research findings indicate that it is about time for linguists as educational planners to consider these sociolinguistic differences in teaching Kurdish language to non-Kurdish people in order to prevent any probable mishaps in their communications and interactions with Kurdish speakers.