Abstract

Although speech acts are universal phenomena which occur in all languages, the realizations of speech acts are culturally-specific. Language learners should not only have linguistic competence, but they should also be aware of the appropriate use of a given function in the target language. In addition, unlike certain speech acts which have received a great deal of research (e.g. request, apology, complaint), certain other speech acts have attracted few researchers’ attention (e.g. responding to rudeness) The objective of the present contrastive pragmatic study is to investigate pragmatic behavior of male native speakers of English and Farsi in response to situations in which they experience offensive and rude language directed toward them. Data were elicited through an open ended questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) from a sample of ten American and ten Iranian male university students. The data were coded based on Beebe and Zhang Waring’s (2005) classification of responding to rudeness. This study is significant both in terms of the choice of the specific speech act (responding to rudeness) and the choice of a male student population (i.e. American and Iranian) as no previous study has addressed this speech act with this specific dyad. The findings of the study are anticipated to have useful insight for research in pragmatic competence as well as teaching speech acts.