Self-sacrifice expressions in Persian

Abstract

In spite of its prevalence in Iranian Persian-speaking communities, the issue of self-sacrifice expressions as a culture-specific verbal behavior has remained almost ignored in the existing literature on speech acts. The current study is an enquiry into the use of self-sacrifice expressions by Iranian Persian speakers in performing different speech acts such as thanking, sympathizing, and expressing affection and love. Serving as a device of encoding emotion into speech, self-sacrifice expressions have been found to be of variety in diction as well as variation in frequency across such social factors as age, gender, and education level. The results indicate pragmalinguistic variations in the use of self-sacrifice expressions in terms of social context, gender, age, and educational level. The tenets of this study are intended to be of insight into socio-cultural aspects of self-sacrifice expressions in language use.