Cross Cultural Analysis of Refusal Speech Acts in American and Persian Movies: Pragmatic Variation in Focus

One of the most important subjects in the pragmatic research is speech act. It has a significant role in the communication and in a variety of the situations. It refers to the actions such as apology, suggestion, complaint, request and refusal. Refusal consider as a face threatening act. Therefore, this study aims to identify the refusal speech acts used in American and Persian movies. This research used qualitative method in which data collection is done by watching the movies and analyzing each character s dialogues. To this end 3 Persian and American movies selected to find out how often the refusal speech acts are most frequently used in the movie. The result indicated that refusal speech act of explanation; regret are the most frequently used in Iranian movies (17.52). The least frequently used refusal speech act is complaining (%1.46). It showed that Iranian used indirective strategies to mention their meaning in a way that they do not threaten their listeners face

کلیدواژه ها:

Refusal speech act ، Pragmatic variation