Document Type : Original Article

Author

• Najmeh Nasri

English Department, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to investigate the cross-cultural differences with regard to the production of a relatively understudied speech act; namely, congratulations. To this end, 48 American native speakers were asked to fill out a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of 4 situations in which the participants were asked to offer congratulations. Besides, the translated versions of the DCT were used to elicit data from 50 Persian native speakers as well as 44 native speakers of Syrian Arabic language. The corpus was analyzed to determine the congratulation strategies used and the frequencies of their occurrence. The content of semantic formulas as well as their shifts according to the status of the hearer were also investigated. Analysis of the data revealed several similarities and differences among the three groups, which may have implications for researchers as well as language teachers.

Keywords

• speech act
• DCT
• congratulations
• cross-cultural pragmatics
• status
• IFID