Abbas Eslami Rasekh - Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
Afroozeh Heidari - English Department, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran
Milad Masoomzadeh - English Department, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Iran

Sociolinguists often criticize speech act researchers for using invented sentences and fictional situations to illustrate their points, a practice which fails to capture the complexity and sequentiality of human interactions. Given the complexity of speech, data which are natural and real conversational speech can shed light on the dominant cultural norms of different variations of languages. This study is an attempt to bring speech acts into their conversational context, to discuss the strategies of refusing from a conversation analysis perspective and to explicate the redressive strategies involved in shopping conversations by doing a cross- cultural study between American and Persian speakers. An analysis was conducted on natural data from the shopping negotiations between customers and sellers. Both qualitative and quantitative examinations were carried out to display the differences in the realization patterns across the two cultural systems. The results showed that Persians as opposed to Americans were more considerate about their dispreferred turns as they employed more mitigating devices during shopping negotiations. To justify their dispreferred acts in shopping, Persian speakers tended to use objective reasons as opposed to Americans who mentioned subjective reasons for their refusals. Being involved in different shopping contexts made degrees of politeness variable, in the sense that Persians would use more polite speech in conversations in upper scale shops while a lower level of politeness was revealed in speech acts involving peddlers and street stands.

Speech act, refusal strategies, conversation analysis, preference organization, politeness