A cross-cultural study of the speech act of advice in Persian and English virtual communication

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Payame Noor University, PO BOX 19395-3697

2 Department of English Language and Literature,, Paya,me Noor University,, Tehran, Iran

10.30473/il.2025.75265.1706

Abstract

The present study was conducted to investigate the advice strategies in comments posted in Persian and English in virtual communication. For this purpose, data were randomly collected from comments in response to Twitter posts seeking advice during the months of July 2023 to July 2024. About 787 comments in English and Persian collected from 40 Twitter posts were analyzed based on the Lucher (2006) advice speech act model for the use of discursive moves, relational work, and linguistic realization. The overall results show that the frequency of advice strategies in the Persian corpus is significantly higher than in the English corpus. Also, the most frequent discourse moves in both Persian and English corpora included advice, explanation, and assessment. In addition, in relational work, the strategies of boosters, use of humor, and hedges were most frequent in the Persian corpus, while the strategies of boosters, hedges, and criticism were most frequent in the English corpus. The results of the corpus analysis in the use of linguistic realization show that the use of imperative structures is most frequent in the Persian corpus, while in the English corpus, the conditional structure is most frequent.

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