A study on iranian funeral posters: Speech acts analysis

Abstract

Different speech acts such as apologies, refusals, invitation, etc., have studied and differences between English and Persian have shown. But there are several speech acts which have not been investigated as extensively as others. One of them is speech act of condolence. The word condolence originates from the Latin word condoler means "to suffer together" (Zunin & Zunin, 2007). It also means informing a loss, expressing sympathy or empathy with someone. As a matter of fact humans are emotional beings and in everyday communication individuals can see this emotionality (Morady Moghadam, 2012). Thus this study investigated and analyzed types of speech acts of 50 authentic texts of funeral posters in Iran then showed the frequency and percentage of them. Out of five kinds of speech acts, only four types of them are used in the texts. Based on the results, the order of most frequent to the least frequent used is declarative, directive, expressive and representative.