Investigating the Effect of Addressee’s Power on the Choice of Politeness Strategies in Speech Act of Advice Giving in Persian

This study investigates the effect of the addressee’s power on the type and number of giving advice strategies, such as “on record”, “negative politeness”, “two” and “three” combination, employed by Persian male and female university students based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory.  A number of 60 M.A students (30 males and 30 females) from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan participated in this study. Discourse completion tests and role play techniques were utilized as two data gathering methods. The data were analyzed using the Chi-square test. The results of the two data collection methods show that the addressee’s power affects the type and the number of giving advice strategies and there is a significant relationship between the addressee’s power and the type as well as the number of giving advice strategies employed by male and female university students. The most frequent strategy type is the “negative politeness” strategies while the least frequent type are “don’t do face threatening act” strategies. As to the number of the strategies, the most frequent and less frequent ones are the combination of three and nine strategies respectively.