چکیده:
Cross-cultural analyses of speech acts are among the hot topics in contrastive studies and up to now various researchers have explored this very issue. Despite the ample studies in this field, the speech act of congratulation, especially the subject of ‘birthday congratulation’ remains untouched. The study investigates the possible effects of being an Iranian or an American typical Facebook user upon the kind of the category which is drawn upon to send an addressee a birthday congratulation note on Facebook. The data collected are 120 birthday congratulation notes issued by 60 Iranians and 60 Americans on Facebook. Seven dominant categories emerged from the study namely ‘Illocutionary Force Indicating Device’ (IFID), ‘Blessing Wishes’, ‘Divine Statements’, ‘Poem and Pieces of Literature’, ‘Endearments’, ‘Felling Expressions’ and ‘Compliments’. Moreover, the possible significant differences between the two groups within these categories were explored. The paper concluded that, in five categories, the differences between the two groups proved significant where the two categories ‘IFID’ and ‘Blessing Wishes’ did not show any significant differences.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Although the speech act of congratulation has not been analyzed much, there are several cross-cultural studies in Iranian context which investigated ‘congratulation’ among Persian and English speakers.
" As the two aforementioned assumptions were addressed in the study, the ‘standard’ Chi-Square test was run for most of categories and the Fisher's Exact Test for the two other categories to specify whether or not there were any significant differences between the results obtained from birthday congratulation notes on Facebook with regard to the two groups’ cultures as Americans and Iranians.
b. Computed only for a 2x2 table As the results indicate, Iranians and Americans used significantly different strategies of birthday congratulation on Facebook with regard to categories Divine Statements, Poems or Pieces of Literature, Endearments, Feeling Expressions, and Compliments.
Taking notice of research question number two, according to the results of the Standard Chi-Square and Fisher's Exact Test, it became apparent that Iranian and American Facebook users employed significantly different patterns of use to congratulate their addressees on their birthdays within the categories of "Divine Statements", "Poems or Pieces of Literature", "Endearments", "Feeling Expressions", and "Compliments" but not when they acted within the categories of "IFID" and "Blessing Wishes".