‘Bebaxšid’ (Excuse Me) as a Multifunctional Speech Act in Persian Massoume Khodaei Moghaddam Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran Mahmoud Elyasi Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran Shahla Sharifi Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran Abstract—This study, based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson’s model of Theory of Politeness (1987), examines and analyzes ‘bebaxšid’ (Excuse me) speech act in Persian language to come up with the functions it serves in the Iranian Persian-speaking community for those non-Persian speakers who want to speak or learn Persian . For this purpose, some native speakers of Persian language from different ages and different social groups were observed in such natural settings as markets, shops, the streets, and parties and their speech was recorded; then transcribed and translated into English; finally, the data was analyzed qualitatively. The results show that, there are ten major functions of ‘bebaxšid’ in Persian which are as follows: apologizing, phatic communication, as a kind of address term, mitigating request, giving a present or offering services, thanking, turn-taking, complaint, refusal, and asking questions. Finally, it is worth noting that using such politeness expressions as ‘bebaxšid’, are not just for mitigating face threatening act (FTA) and many speakers use them in different contexts to have a more polite and successful interaction and communication. This would be incompatible with general characteristics of politeness strategies defined and described by Brown and Levinson (1987) who consider politeness simply as a means of mitigating FTA. Index Terms—bebaxšid, speech act, politeness, face, face threatening act, function I. INTRODUCTION Pragmatics is‖ the study of how more gets communicated than is said‖ (Yule, 2000, p.3),. Pragmatics is something more than what is said and in fact it studies the intention of the speakers. Regarding pragmatic competence as its basic component and, in turn, speech act, has been given particular attention as the most fundamental part within pragmatics (Schmidt & Richards, 1980). Speech act theory was first introduced by Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words, published in 1962. A speech act, according to Austin (1962) is ―the issuance of an utterance which is intended to accomplish or perform a specific act‖ (p. 6). So, speech act theory is concerned with uses of language. The main contribution of speech act theory is the explanation of communicative competence. Speech acts, with different functions, are considered as a crucial element in everyday conversation, (Chen and Chen, 2007), so it is quite essential to investigate different types of them and their functions in order to have an efficient communication. ‘Bebaxšid’ (Excuse me) is one of these speech acts which has different functions and different meanings in different contexts in Persian. In order to use this speech act and react to it appropriately, and to avoid any communication failure, a Persian learner should be familiar with its different functions. Although the study of speech acts has a rather long history (beginning in the 1960s), the study of production and perception of different speech acts related to Persian language has been started during the last 15 years. There are lots of studies carried out on speech acts realization. These studies mainly involve such speech acts as thanking (Koutlaki, 2002), complaint (Eslami-Rasekh, 2004), apology (Afghari & Kaviani, 2005), gripping (Allami, 2006), invitation (Salmani-Nodoushan, 2006), compliment (Sharifian, 2008), disagreement (Parvaresh & Eslami-Rasekh, 2009), condolence (Samavarchi, Allami, & Samavarchi , 2009), suggestion (Pishghadam and Sharafadini, 2011), Insha‘ Allah (God‘s willing) and its functions in Persian (Pishghadam and Kermanshahi, 2012), but so far, there has been no study conducted in Persian to investigate different functions of ‘bebaxšid’ speech act . Hence, in this paper, we are to examine different functions involved with this high-frequent speech act in Persian. II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Researchers working on pragmatics have carried out their studies based on different theoretical frameworks. One of these theories which has received much attention and has a crucial role in total comprehension of such speech act as ‘bebaxšid’ is Brown and Levinson‘s Politeness Theory (1978/1987). However, before dealing with politeness theory, it is quite essential to refer to Goffman‘s (1967) term of face work, which refers to a mechanism that is res ponsible for ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 641-646, March 2014 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.4.3.641-646 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER