چکیده:
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian romantic novels and whether Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach can be considered in English and Persian requests. To reach these objectives, the corpus consisting of two English and Persian romantic novels were used. It was analyzed using Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984)’s classification. Results indicated that mood derivable was the most frequent request strategy in both novels. Moreover, a statistically significant difference was not observed between request strategies in English and Persian romantic novels and thus the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach can be considered in English and Persian requests. The conclusion drawn is that considering the applicability of this approach, both American and Iranian native speakers can presumably use imperative structures, with the politeness marker please or without it, as a request strategy, when the interlocutors are close friends or members of the same family.
خلاصه ماشینی:
A Contrastive Study of Request Speech Act in English and Persian Novels: Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach Ziba Amini, Department of English, Falavarjan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran z.
However, reviewing the literature and to the best knowledge of the researchers, no study has investigated English and Persian in terms of request speech act to see whether or not Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) can be considered in these two languages in terms of the speech act of request.
, 2014, to name a few) have studied request strategies used by non-native speakers of English in an ESL/EFL context; however, no research has been conducted to explore this speech act used by native speakers of English and Persian in natural language used in social interactions.
Thus, to fill this gap, this study was an attempt to compare the request strategies used by English and Persian native speakers in romantic novels which can be considered as a source of naturally occurring data to see if NSM is applicable to the speech act of request in English and Persian.
Analysis Framework The instrument which was exploited in the present study to analyze the speech act of request in English and Persian romantic novels was the coding scheme developed by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984).
Hence, the answer to the second research question is that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach which highlights the universality of languages and strengthens the existence of similarities among languages exists in English and Persian in terms of the speech act of request.