demanding versus asking in persian: requestives as acts of verbal harassment

Assuming that demanding and asking are different types of requestives, the study hypothesized (a) that they differ in their degrees and types of indirectness in request head acts (has) and internal and/or external supportive discourse moves (isms/esms), (b) that this is informed by people’s ethnic mindsets, psychic delusions, and/or intentional attempts at negotiating social power, and (c) that any miscomputation of one’s true social power may change a ‘requestive’ into a an act of verbal ‘harassment’ that can terminate interlocutors’ relationships and connections. to test these hypotheses, 229 ‘hurting’ requests collected through verbal recalls, written recalls, and online interviews were coded by two expert human coders using blum-kulka, færch and kasper's (1989) coding scheme for has, and house and kasper’s (1981) and færch and kasper’s (1989) coding schemes for isms and esms. results indicated that hearers and speakers differ in their computations of requestives based on their ethnic, linguistic, and psychological perceptions.