Analysis of the Didactic Contents of Golestan on the Basis of the Searle's Theory of Speech ActsAbstract

The use of linguistic theories in the discourse analysis of literary works can reveal new aspects of these works. This paper seeks to analyze the "contents" of Golestan Sa'adi on the basis of the Searl's Theory of Speech Acts to find some linguistic reasons to prove the effectiveness of these themes using the statistical method and content analysis.For the analysis, the themes of the fifth and seventh chapters were first extracted, and then the type of the semantic roles, vocabulary (action verbs), the form, the structure of the sentence and its context were examined in the domain covered by each theme; in this way, the direct speech acts of the statements are recognized from the indirect speech acts. The data analysis was done based on the Searl's theory of speech acts. On the one hand, the interaction between the speech acts and the linguistic and semantic features as well as the context of each theme was investigated, and on the other hand, the manner of Saadi's speech delivery was examined on the appropriate use of speech acts in the educational genre in accordance with the subject of the speech (here the two chapters of Golestan with two different themes). Based on the findings of the study, as far as the indirect speech acts (the speech acts inferred from the function of the context) are concerned, in the seventh chapter, the persuasive, expressive, and affective speech acts had the highest use in the language propositions, respectively. Given the didactic nature of this book, this result was predictable. In the fifth chapter of the Golestan, the most language roles used in the linguistic propositions are expressive, affective, and persuasive, respectively; and the frequency of speech acts does not change in the case of excluding the indirect persuasive speech acts. Given the title and subject of this chapter (love and youth), it is natural that the frequency of functions is more related to the affective and expressive speech acts. The indirect speech acts of this chapter are also more of the affective one than persuasive.