On the Realization of the Written Congratulation Speech act in ModernPersian

Having noticed the scarcity of the studies on congratulation speech act in Persian, this paper was motivated to explore and categorize the range of strategies used to congratulate one’s carrier promotion in Persian newspaper messages.Conducting a corpus study, a total of 200 congratulation messages in eight Persian newspapers were collected in one year period from December 2021 to December 2022. Rigorous investigation of the corpus helped developing a classification scheme, including 18 strategies that Persian speakers often employ while congratulating. Analysis of the data revealed that the addressers in the present research repeatedly exhibited rapport-enhancing behaviors. They demonstrated their empathy with addressees through congratulating, well-wishing and expressing happiness or pride. They also expressed respect through applying varieties of address terms for the addressees and using the expressions which communicate deference. Findings also revealed that through expressing happiness, respect, pride, congratulating, well wishing, using address terms and titles with full formal names, and mentioning the new social status/position, both identity and respectability faces of the addressees were enhanced. Interestingly, the addressers’ identity face was also enhanced due to the fact that by applying all those strategies, the addressers can claim a positive social value for themselves during this particular contact.

On the Realization of the Written Congratulation Speech act in ModernPersian Keywords:

speech act , congratulation message , identity face , respectability face , rapport-enhancing behavior