Maryam
Farnia
Payame Noor University, Iran
Hiba Qusay Abdul Sattar
Australian Technical
Management College, Australia
Abstract
This paper examines the speech act of criticism among Iranian native
speakers of Persian. Making and taking criticism can be difficult since no
one would like to be told that he or she is wrong. In fact, criticism is a very
important speech act in people’s daily life. More and more people view
criticism as a panel from where they can improve their performance or how to do
things better. It is commonly used by people in almost all cultures.
However, this
speech act is very situation-dependent in that speakers should know how to
perform the speech act considering such aspects as the hearer, the relationship
with the hearer, the topic, the purpose of the speech, and the appropriate
linguistic forms for the speech act. Empirical studies on speech
acts show that the same speech act is very likely to be realized quite
differently across different cultures. Accordingly, the primary objectives of this study are to
examine Iranians’ perception and production of the speech act of criticism.
Data are based on the distribution of a Discourse Evaluation Test (DET) and a
structured interview. It consisted of four situations given to 100 Iranian native speakers of
Persian at Payame Noor University, Iran. The corpus was then analyzed and
categorized based on Nguyen’s (2005)
coding scheme, in which criticisms are coded according to their
realization strategies and external modifiers. The overall findings showed that
the use of direct strategies outnumbered that of indirect strategies and
mitigating devices. However, one distinctive feature of the present data was
that politeness is achieved through the use of mitigating devices.
Keywords: Pragmalinguistics, sociopragmatics,
speech act, criticisms, Persians
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