An Investigation of the Relationship between Gender and Different Strategies of Expressing Request in English and Persian Films

Abstract

The main objective of the present study is to elaborate the contrasts between males and females in their use of different strategies of request in English and Persian and ascertain the degree to which independent variables like gender and language affect the application of these strategies during informal communication.Furthermore, it offers comparable corpora which provide a good basis for cross-linguistic comparison of distribution of this functional strategy within the context of Persian and English movies. The focus of this study is on the implementation of different strategies of 'request' by English and Persian males and females in accordance with Blum-Kulka's framework of requestive strategies (1989). This research targets at figuring out differences between English and Persian males and females in relation to the application of the previously-mentioned strategies. In addition, in order to gather the most authentic data, four English and four Persian films, dealing with family and social theme, are analyzed. Concerning gender dyads, both in Persian and English, some significant differences are detected.