Ahmad Izadi

• Senior Researcher in Language and Communication
• Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at University of Bayreuth

Im/Politeness has recently been conceptualized in terms of evaluations that not only arise in social practice but also form a social practice (Haugh, 2013; Kádár and Haugh, 2013). This necessitates the analysis of politeness to go beyond the analysis of language to the analysis of social actions and meanings. This paper examines the role of Persian...

Over-politeness is an under-represented topic in interpersonal pragmatics, compared with politeness and impoliteness. Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and theory of im/politeness as social practice (Haugh, 2013; Kádár and Haugh, 2013), this paper examines the ways over-politeness is interactionally achieved in two types of academic professional d...

In theorizing face as relational and interactional, Arundale (2010) argues that face encompasses a dialectic of relational connection and separation, which is culture-general, but can be voiced differently in different cultures. This paper examines how Arundale's Face Constituting Theory (FCT) relates to the culture-specific emic understanding of f...

This article brings together the two notions of epistemics and face, understood as relational connection and separation (Arundale, 2010). It aims to demonstrate how participants interactionally achieve relational connection and separation through displaying, contesting and negotiating claims to knowledge along with the interactional achievement of...

*Describes the interactional function of ‘e’-marked definite nominals in Persian interactions. *Argues for the epistemic bases of the e-marked reference formulations. *Argues for the relational function of the e-marked reference formulations.

PhD examination is a unique type of assessment with examiners playing a key role in it. Despite extensive research on various modes of academic genre, research on the examiners' language representing oral review genre is yet underrepresented. One important way to identify this genre is to unpack the metadiscursive features that constitute this type...

This paper reports on two anomalous cases of intervention in two English-medium dissertation defence sessions in Iran. The first is an intervention by a co-supervisor to take side against his co-supervisor as well as to adversely retort to an examiner, pulling rank over him. The second case echoes frequent interventions by an examiner to defend the...

In Iran one’s image of the ‘self’ , reected in the metaphor aaberu (lit. water of the face) has been found by this author to be closely linked to a social force reected in the metaphor harfe mardom (lit. people’s talk). Understanding the complexities of interpersonal relationships would not be possible without reference to these interwoven concep...

Evaluations of polite, impolite and over-polite linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors depend largely on the socio-cultural attributes of a society and the individuals' schemata, which are rooted in the communicators' previous experiences. In intercultural settings, communication represents a complicated picture due to the participants' different s...

Taarof is among the most important components of Persian cultural identity, and is considered the backbone of Persian ritual politeness (Beeman, 1976; Koutlaki, 2002, Izadi, 2015, 2016). Given this capacity, taarof has a great potential for intercultural mis/communication between Iranians and non-Iranians, and has direct implication for Iranian’s ‘...

Taking up the role of examiner in PhD dissertation defense (DD) sessions involves dealing with two contradictory desires: effective delivery of criticisms, and maintain- ing a positive interpersonal relationship with the recipients of those criticisms. This study explores the discourse strategies examiners use to express the speech act of criticism...

Vivas have multiple functions in academia, but their main goal is completing thesis evaluation. At the heart of this evaluation is a series of criticisms and their responsive turns by which participants talk vivas as institution into being (Heritage, 1997). Turn-taking is one of the many ways vivas are talked into being. This study drew upon conver...

This study investigates how Iranian speakers of Persian realize the speech act of refusals to the initiating acts of offers, suggestions, invitations and requests. Two hundred and eight acts of refusals were naturally collected and classified according to the refusal classification scheme proposed by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss‐Weltz. The results s...

Despite having unwelcome effects on interpersonal relationships, disagreements constitute the mainstream of talk in dissertation defense sessions. This paper reports on variations in the design of disagreement turns in 20 Iranian defense sessions in L2 English. Drawing on and modifying Locher’s (2004) classification of disagreement strategies, turn...

The study investigated linguistic politeness in ten viva voce sessions occurring in two universities in Iran. The model of politeness which was proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) was drawn upon in the study to analyze academic talk in the review context of viva sessions. Particularly, the study focused on negative politeness strategies, which ar...

Arundale’s Face Constituting Theory is used to examine the way face is conjointly co-constituted in criticism–criticism response exchanges in PhD vivas in Iran. This approach carried out in CA tradition on institutional talk makes it possible to explain how face is achieved in the manner grounded in the interactants’ perspective. The analysis conce...

Three components have been introduced for foreign language learning anxiety in the literature: Test anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and communication apprehension. This study teases out the first of the three components with special focus on listening comprehension test to investigate the correlation between listening test results and foreign...

The study adopts social constructionist approach to see how gender identity is dynamically constructed in husband and wife's expression of marital expectations from each other. The basic view is that the linguistic forms the couple use to describe their expectations of their opposite-sex spouses not only reflect but also reinforce and reconstruct t...

This article examines ways in which participants achieve face in Iranian dissertation defences, while doing interactional work in their roles as candidate, examiner or supervisor. Following Arundale, we adopt the notion of face as an interactional and relational phenomenon which is conjointly co-constituted by participants as they conjointly co-con...

This study investigated the similarities and differences between Iranian EFL learners’ use of English and Persian refusals, using role play scenarios. It also examined the influence of participants’ native language on the production of refusals in English as a foreign language. How the refuser-refusees’ social distance and power relations affected...