On apologizing in Persian: A socio-cultural inquiry

Abstract: The present study attempts to outline the degree and type of use of apology strategies in Per-sian and elaborate on the socio- cultural attitudes and values of this community. The infor-mants were 330 college educated adults in Shiraz, Iran. The corpus examined was 3300 re-sponses to a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that consisted of 10 different social situations of varying severity of offense, strength of social relationship and power between hypothetical speakers and hearers. The survey was written in Persian to elicit responses that approximate verbal apologies that might be given in these situations. The researchers analyzed the corpus to determine the strategies used and the frequencies of their use. Although this is a study in its societal context, results supported earlier findings suggesting the universality of apology strategies; however, the selection of apology strategies in this study reinforced the culture-specific aspect of language use. Despite the fact that a restricted classification of strategies was used as a model for analyzing the data, the results are expected to be conducive to cross-cultural comparisons.