Congratulations Across Cultures: English Versus Armenian and Persian Speakers

The proper use of speech acts plays a vital role in the development of pragmatic competence. Whereas some speech acts such as apologies, requests, compliments and complaints have been extensively studied, the speech act of congratulations has not been as widely perused. The present study compared the strategies native Americans utilize for offering congratulations with the ones used by Armenians and Iranians. To this end, the data were gleaned through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) to which 40 native Americans responded. Analysis of the data revealed several similarities and differences between the three groups which will be discussed in the paper.