the current study was carried out to investigate the functions of the ritual speech act of ‘ya allah’ (literally meaning ‘o god’) employed by iranians in social interactions. to this end, sixty-two persian native speakers of different age groups, ranging from 35 to 85, of both genders were observed in 250 natural situations such as daily interactions, gatherings, public or private places and lo...

The purpose of the study was to examine how teacher motivational practice might influence Iranian EFL Learners’ Request and Refusal Speech Acts Production. To this end, five instruments were used to provide appropriate responses to research questions: (a) Quick Placement Test (b) the Motivational Orientation of Language Teaching classroom observation scheme, (c) the Post-Lesson Teacher Evaluati...

Owing to the growing interest in communicative, cultural and pragmatic aspects of second language learning in recent years, the present study tried to investigate representations of pragmatic aspects of English as a foreign language in Iranian high school textbooks. Using Halliday’s (1978), and Searle’s (1976) models, different language functions and speech acts were specifically determined and...

The  current  study  investigated  the  expression  of  disagreement  by  Iranian  advanced  English learners.  The  data  for  the  study  comprised  the  recorded  discussions  of  26  male  and  female interlocutors  in  three  different  settings:  1)  language  institute,  2)  home  environment,  and  3) university  setting.  Analysis  of  the  arguments  pointed  to  the  influence  of  c...

The current paper primarily provides an account of how apology speech acts are internally intensified in Persian. Moreover, the study checks to what extent contextual variables, namely social distance and severity of offense, may motivate the internal intensification of apology speech acts. To these ends, the study collected the required speech acts through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) fro...

second language  learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (kasper & roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( bardovi-harlig, 1999; khatib & ahmadisafa, 2011). this study is a partial attempt to address the lacuna and aims to see if any relation...