© 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Congratulation and Positive Politeness Strategies in Iranian Context

Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms of the Taxonomy proposed by Elwood (2004), representing the basic verbal strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers in offering congratulations. Based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness (1987), it further explored the positive politeness strategies in the congratulation speech act. Fifty informants filled in a discourse completion test, consisting of 9 situations related to happy news. The analysis of the data revealed that the mostly used types of congratulation strategies were “Illocutionary Force Indicating Devise (IFID)”, “Offer of good wishes ” and “Expression of happiness”. Regarding the positive politeness strategies the result was indicative of the fact that Iranian people mostly made use of the strategies “Giving gift to listener”, “Exaggeration ” and “In-group identity marker ” when responding to other’s happy news. Index Terms—sociopragmatics, speech acts of congratulation, commiseration, Persian I