The Study of the Effect of Addressee’s Power and Gender on the Choice of Politeness Strategies in Encouragement Speech Act in Persian

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of the addressee’s power and gender on the choice of the type and number of encouragement strategies 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 test and role play technique were utilized as two data gathering instruments. The data were analyzed using the Chi-square and Independent-T test (p<.05). The results indicated there was a significant relationship between the addressee’s power and the type as well as the number of encouragement strategies employed by male and female university students. The most frequent strategy type was the “negative politeness” giving deference for the addressee with higher power (the professor). As to the number of strategies, the most and less frequent ones were the combination of two and nine strategies, respectively. The addressee’s gender had an effect on the type of the strategies used by male students in three situations; while it didn’t have any effect on the number of strategies used by male students and also on the type and number of strategies employed by female students. The most frequent strategy type used by female students was the “positive politeness” and the combination of three strategies for male and female addressees; by male students: “positive politeness” for male addressees and “negative politeness” and the combination of two strategies for female addressees.