عذرخواهی

This study investigates the use of apologizing strategies by speakers of Azerbaijani Turkish in Iran. One hundred and twenty (60 male and 60 female) randomly selected speakers of Azerbaijani Turkish from Tabriz participated in a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and returned 2400 apology speech acts. The DCT included 20 scenarios representing 10 discourse situations. The acts were analyzed based on the categorization suggested by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), which included Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, Taking on responsibility, Explanation, Offer of repair, Promise of forbearance, Concern for the hearer, and Nonverbal strategies. The findings indicated that the highly preferred apology strategies among the participants are explanation and offer of repair. Moreover, there was a statistically significant association between the independent variables (the participants’ age, gender, and level of education) and the choice of apology strategies. However, such an association was only significant for some discourse situations; e.g., in interaction with relatives that are in an equal status with the participant and in an adult-child interaction where the participant has a superior status.

This study examins the effect of social status on politness in apologetic discourse based on politeness model of (Brown & Levinson 1987-1978). The research method was quantitative and qualitative and data collection was done by sending a questionnaire electronically to students. The Questionnaire (DCT) assessed apology strategies for 12 common mistakes in the community. Research participants included a limited number of students from Al-Zahra Campus, Elmi Karbordi University of Jihad and Khaneh kargar in Zanjan. Analyzing the collected responses of 44 female and 62 male students, the results showed that, people use more negative politeness strategy in expressing apology. Analyzing the effect of social status on using politeness strategies showed in all three positions of social status; Equally, higher position and lower position, people use more negative politeness strategy. The results also showed that the use of politeness strategies in compensating for mistakes depends on the type of mistake made and people use the best apology strategy that can compensate the mistake made. The results of the study did not show a significant difference between gender and the use of politeness strategy.

Considering one of the earliest calls for applying pragmatics in second language, Kasper and Rose’s (2002) study “Is Pragmatic Teachable?”, pragmatic features have been analyzed during the last 20 years in EFL/ESL contexts. The amalgamation of studies has been conducted on many speech acts around the world within the last two decades, among which request, apology, and refusal are considered as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. The purpose of the present paper is to unravel the overall effectiveness of the intervention on the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal in an Iranian EFL context. To this aim, out of a total number of 80 studies, 57 papers were chosen based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which were coded for the analysis. The results of the study revealed that the instruction of request, apology, and refusal is effective and generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.

The purpose of this research is to compare speech acts in interactions of Persian monolingual and Turkish-Persian bilingual students. This research is a field research in the field of language usage. This is a cross-sectional and descriptiveanalytical research that collects information using a questionnaire. The statistical population includes monolingual (Persian) and bilingual (PersianTurkish) students, 100 bilingual students and 100 monolingual students in a random cluster, among the students of Payam Noor and Azad universities in Firozabad and Jam from different disciplines. Bloom and Kolka (1982) questionnaires related to requests and apologies were used to measure speech interactions in the two areas of requests and apologies, each of which contains 18 questions. In this research, in order to analyze the data, SPSS statistical software was used, and the data was examined and analyzed in two parts, descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings showed that most of the responses to apologies are direct. Also, the monolingual group has more interactions than the bilingual group. In the request reaction, most of the answers are direct. The monolingual group has more speech acts. Request reactions, whether in terms of accepting or rejecting the request, are more among monolingual people. The degree of difficulty of actions in the speakers of Turkish has the highest average and the probability of requested action in the speech of the speakers of Persian is higher with a small difference.

Political apologies, are among special type of apologies, which the politicians state to protect their own faces and to fulfill the communal need. But apologizing has its own strategies. Kempf (2009) introduces some verbal strategies such as Using lexical and syntactical means, omitting or blurring the gent, denying responsibility, selecting a specific victim, undermining the existence of the victim, and apology for a component of the offense (and not for the entire occurrence), etc. by the use of which the politicians avoid sincere apologies. Through Investigation of 100 utterances of apologies by politicians as broadcasted in the national and local media, the present article claims that these apologies are insincere. The results indicate that these insincerities have their roots in the Iranian cultural Memes of collectivism, overstating and truth avoiding.

Modesty is one of the moral virtues that is recommended in Quran and traditions. In many of the mystical and divine books is pointed to definition, kinds, signs, results and examples of modesty. In some of the mystical texts for example Alloma', Resale Ghosheyriye, Mesbah o Alhedaya and Tazkerat o Aloliya' is pointed to a rare method for modesty that sometime is used for apology. As mystical texts are an important section in classical culture and literature, know these mores help to better perception of these works. One of these traditions is the strange custom that the person for apologize, resolving annoyance, respectability and humility put one side of his face on the ground and the other side wants opposite party to put his foot on it. This is considered the height of humility especially if done by someone honorable and respected. This article that was written by library and content analysis, is firstly tried to collect and analyze the most important evidences in the mystical texts and history of Islam then refer to some examples of Persian poetry and prose that are related to this custom.

Apology has been mostly studied from a pragmatics standpoint and as a frequent speech act, especially in Persian language. This paper, however, aims at a discourse analysis of apology, taking as its framework, the interdisciplinary approach introduced in Lakoff (2015). The data are collected form official apologies in the Iranian media between 2015- 2018. The results show that firstly, without taking an interdisciplinary stance many interactional aspects of this speech act is neglected. This is because apology is one of the face- saving speech acts in the representation of which contextual and interpersonal factors, and the speaker’s and addressee’s perspective play an important role in the ways preferred by the speaker to apologize. Moreover the nature of public and political discourse multiplies the complexities and forces the speakers get the benefit of all linguistic and extra- linguistic means at different levels to achieve their communicative goals. Secondly, the prototypical explicit apologies in public discourse are rare, so that most of the cases studied are instances of non- apology rather than apology. The reason behind this fact can be traced back to the nature of public and political discourses in which apology would bring about negative consequences for the apologizer. Also, one of the main presuppositions of this speech act is that the apologizer implicitly accepts the responsibility of the wrongdoing and her reluctance to apologize explicitly in public and political discourse is a conscious or unconscious attempt to avoid the negative consequences of shouldering the responsibilities in these formal settings. Accordingly, different representations of apology can be placed somewhere on a continuum with prototypical apology at one end and non- apology at the other one. This paves the way for considering apology as a radial category at the level of discourse and for adding a cognitive level of analysis to the framework at hand.

Dynamic assessment (DA) having root in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind has been investigated by many researchers. However, DA of pragmatics has not been much researched. Considering the important role of pragmatic competence in promoting learners’ communicative competence, the current study examined the effectiveness of dynamic assessment, cake model, on the development of learners’ pragmatic competence. To conduct the research a number of 46 MSc students of engineering, studying at the University of Tehran, were assessed dynamically. The assessment provided three scores: actual score, mediated score, and learning potential score (LPS). In order to analyze the data, paired sample t-test and univariate analysis of variance were run. The results showed that DA had a positive effect on learners’ knowledge of the speech acts of apology and request. The results also showed that there was no interaction between learners’ scores and their proficiency levels. The findings of the research can be used in teaching, assessing and learning the speech acts of apology and request.