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With the advancement of technology, students’ means of communication have changed from regular face-to-face appointments to email communications with professors and faculty members. Students send emails to faculty members for several reasons such as requests for appointments, advice, or course-related information. This study investigates email request strategies used by Iranian university students when communicating with their faculty members. To this end, a corpus of 200 emails (13103 words) was compiled within 4 years from Payame Noor University students majoring in humanities. The data were then coded for request strategies along with both internal and external modification devices. The findings showed that direct strategies were the most frequently used, with imperative and like/appreciate statements being the most frequently used direct strategy. Moreover, downtoners and attention getters ranked first and second among internal modification devices, while grounders and appreciation ranked first and second among external modifiers. These findings are expected to provide insights into Persian pragmatics and have implications for teaching Persian to language learners.

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.

The present study has aimed at comparing different types of speech acts in Persian and English verbal cultures. The results obtained by comparing data revealed different speech acts were present in lullabies of both languages with the frequency sequence of directive (explicit and implicit), expressive, representative, commissive, and declarative types. In both languages, expressive acts are stated in different forms of praises, wishes, prayers, fears, and threats. In Persian language, however, comparison between child and different flowers in the form of simile is very common. Likewise, the elements of fear and threat have had more expansion and variety in Persian lullabies. Being worried over the husband’s remarriage is the characteristics of Iranian women in the past. Moreover, English lullabies were found to be void of the element of mother’s tiredness. Expressing belief attachments and social concerns in the form of representative speech acts were also common in lullabies of both Persian and English verbal cultures. Commitment to fulfill promises made to the child, as well as expressing conditions that the child is forced to accept, namely commissive and declarative acts were also found in both languages, especially in Persian.

The tradition of giving Good tiding in the Quran is the Almighty God’s absolute and inevitable tradition. In the pragmatic approach to the Quran, more than investigating words, their meanings and syntactic relations, the primary concern is the speaker and the audience, the conversations and their context. In explaining the context of realization of good tidings, the bringer of good tidings in the Quran is God who also mentions Angels, winds, and prophets as carriers of good tidings. In this study, , in addition to drawing the context of the speech act of good tiding, we intend to explain the necessary conditions for the realization of the speech act of good tiding and demonstrate how the speaker, that is, the Almighty God, the audience and other listeners contribute to understanding the context of conversations. The theoretical basis of this study is Austin’s and Searle's speech act theories. The research method employed is a descriptive analysis. The data examined included verses from some chapters including Nisa, A’araf, Asra, towbeh, Younos, Zomor, Anfal, Kahf and Fosillat where instances of good tidings are found.