Abstract:
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) from among Persian male native speakers. The data was analyzed based on the coding scheme developed by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989). The results revealed that apology speech acts are intensified in Persian in most cases through universal strategies of internal intensification. Moreover, the Persian speakers are sensitive to severity of the offense, as a context-internal variable, which motivates more internal intensifications of apologies. The findings, however, revealed that social distance as a context-external variable does not prompt the use of internal intensifications differently in situations where there is social distance between interlocutors compared to situations where there is no social distance between interlocutors
Machine summary:
The Impact of Contextual Variables on Internal Intensification of Apology Speech Acts in Persian: Social Distance and Severity of Offense in Focus Mohsen Shahrokhi * Assistant Professor , Department of English, Shahreza Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahreza, Iran.
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.
The results revealed that apology speech acts are intensified in Persian in most cases through universal strategies of internal intensification.
The analysis of strategies employed in apology speech acts and the way strategies are intensified among Persian native speakers can be an investigation to see whether it can provide supporting evidence to Brown and Levinson‟s (1987) universal theory.
Shahrokhi and Jan (2012) investigated the realization of apology speech act by Persian male native speakers to categorize and formulate the apology strategies employed in their interactions in contexts where the effect of power, distance, and severity of offense were varied.
Data Analysis and Results for First Research Question The results include examples, frequencies, and percentages of internal intensifiers employed with apology strategies to highlight Persian male participants‟ linguistic behavior.
The lack of social distance between the interlocutors, as well as the low severity of the offense makes this situation the most suitable situation for the use of Emotion as internal intensifier among Persian male native speakers of the study.
Data Analysis and Results for Third Research Question The third research question of the study was posed to check whether social distance affects the use of Internal Intensifiers strategies realized by male Persian speakers.