Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Speech Act of Greeting In Persian and English

The present study investigates the sociolinguistic aspects of the speech act of greeting and its differences regarding expressive or productive forms of greeting in Persian and English. Contrastive studies of speech acts ofdifferent languages could help to overcome the gap that might happen in interpersonal communication among thespeakers of various languages. The current paper focuses on the descriptive sociolinguistic analysis of the speech act of‘greeting’ and the style of greetings in the mentioned languages. We have used different methods like questionnaire,observation, interview, introspection and statistical analysis to collect data. The materials, which were analyzed, involve Persian greetings that take place in real-life situations and English greetings recorded in audiovisual materialsdownloaded from the internet. The results show that social contexts have their influence on expressing the speech act ofgreeting in both Persian and English, and that each language has its own peculiarities and even some similarities with the other one. We have defined how greeting operates in our life

Keywords:

speech act of greeting , greeting forms , communicative competence , gender , generation , social status