Speech Acts of Women in Simin Daneshvar’s Soovashoon Novel

Speech acts as the pragmatic part of the language have significant role in the social status representation of society people. So, investigating speech acts of the novel characters can enhance pragmatic and sociolinguistic knowledge of the foreign language learners and improve sociocultural knowledge of the foreigners about a speech community. According to the necessity and importance of this issue in Persian learning, and the lack of local social researches in applied linguistics and Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages (TPSOL), through a qualitative content analysis method, the present study investigates speech acts used in Simin Daneshvar’s “Soovashoon” Persian novel. The results show that the male and female characters of this novel have used the assertive, directive, and expressive speech acts more than the commissive, and declarative speech acts. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the results shows that Iranian women, in both the urban and rural contexts, follow almost the same pattern in using Searle’s (1969) speech acts.