چکیده:
The present study investigated the speech act of gratitude in the context of Instagram as one of the most popular social networks. It sought to consider English and Persian users’ utilization of gratitude strategies in terms of employment of politeness strategies, intensifiers, interjections, and gender difference. To this end, 200 English Instagram posts along with 200 Persian Instagram posts were investigated. Contrary to previous findings that indicated different performances by English and Persian language speakers in real-life situations, the results of this study, after performing chi-square tests, suggested no significant difference between English and Persian users in terms of their utilization of politeness strategies, intensifiers, and interjections. Regarding gender difference, which addressed the use of both gratitude and politeness strategies for each language, for both nationalities, no significant difference was observed between female and male users within the context of Instagram. The finding may signify the emergence of a new genre of language belonging to social networks in general and Instagram in particular.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Contrary to previ- ous findings that indicated different performances by English and Persian language speakers in real-life situations, the results of this study, after performing chi-square tests, suggested no significant difference between English and Persian users in terms of their utilization of politeness strat- egies, intensifiers, and interjections.
Regarding gender difference, which addressed the use of both gratitude and politeness strategies for each language, for both nationalities, no significant difference was observed between female and male users within the context of Instagram.
To this end, Cheng's (2005) taxonomy of gratitude speech act, Brown and Levinson's (1987) stratification of positive and negative politeness strategies, Morady Moghaddam's (2012) categorization of intensifiers, Jovanović's (2004) grouping of English interjec- tions in accordance with the predominant semantic connotation of their mean- ings, and Kamyar's (1995) classification of Persian interjections were employed as the frameworks to investigate the two groups’ gratitude strategy use in terms of employing politeness strategies, intensifiers, interjections, and gender difference.
The present study was a contrastive study intending to compare and contrast the discourse structure of gratitude speech act in English and Persian considering four factors: the use of politeness strategies, intensifiers, interjections, and gender differences.
4. Are there any significant differences between English-speaking male and female users of Instagram in terms of gratitude expression and polite- ness strategy use?
Discussion This study was an attempt to compare and contrast the use of gratitude strate- gies respecting the use of politeness strategies, intensifiers, interjections, and gender differences between English- and Persian-speaking Instagram users.