A sociopragmatic study of apology speech act realization patterns in Persian

This research study aimed at extracting and categorizing the range of strategies used in performing the speech act of apologizing in Persian. The first objective was to see if Persian apologies were formulaic in pragmatic structure as in English apologies are said to be [Holmes, J., 1990. Apologies in New Zealand English. Lang. Soc. 19, 155–200; Wolfson, N., Judd, E. (Eds.), 1983. Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition. Rowley, Mass, Newbury House].The other issue explored in this study was the investigation of the effect of the values assigned to the two context-external variables of social distance and social dominance on the frequency of the apology intensifiers. To this end, Persian apologetic utterances were collected via a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The research findings indicated that Persian apologies are as formulaic in pragmatic structures. Also, the values assigned to the two context-external variables were found to have significant effect on the frequency of the intensifiers in different situations.