Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the strategies adopted by Persian native speakers for expressing their happiness and sorrow. For this purpose, the researcher spent one month observing the behavior of different male and female native speakers of Farsi who were of different ages between 12-68. The researcher collected the data either by participating different events of happiness and sorrow or putting the audience under one of these circumstances by giving them some good or bad news in order to audit their way of expressing happiness and sorrow. The responses collected were extracted as 8 happiness expression strategies (surprise, positive adjectives, appreciation, thanking God, expressing emotions and statements and informal emotional expression) and 6 sorrow-expression strategies (expressing pity, questions, statements, curse words and threatening). Among these strategies, statement was common in both happiness and sorrow strategies. After identifying the strategies, the number and percentage of each strategy was calculated for male and female participants. The results indicated that surprise, thanking God, statements and appreciation are the most frequent happiness strategies among male participants and expressing emotions and surprise are the most frequently-used happiness strategies among female ones. One important point in the strategy of "expressing emotion" is that it is a female-specific strategy not used by male population at all. On the other hand, regarding expressions of sorrow, according to the findings of this research, expressing pity is the most frequent strategy both for males and females. In expressing sorrow, using curse words is the second rank for male participants and other strategies are somehow equally-used among both groups as the difference between the frequencies of male and female was not that considerable.
Highlights
The ability to express emotional states is a central fact in human life and a great number of researches have been focused on the relationship between emotions and nonverbal behaviors, as mentioned by Hancock [2007], few researches have examined how emotions are reflected verbally
Unlike the similar studies done up to the present time on this subject, the current survey has been performed via real data collection, i.e. the researcher has participated different events of happiness and sorrow or has put the audience under one of these circumstances by giving them some good or bad news in order to audit their way of expressing happiness and sorrow
The researcher spent one month observing the behavior of different male and female native speakers of Farsi who were of different ages between 12 - 68
Summary
The ability to express emotional states is a central fact in human life and a great number of researches have been focused on the relationship between emotions and nonverbal behaviors, as mentioned by Hancock [2007], few researches have examined how emotions are reflected verbally. Happiness and sadness are the most common emotions to be expressed all over the word; the way to do so is different among cultures. Iranian culture is much different from that of American in a way that the former prefer to express their feelings more emotionally than the latter; i.e. the Iranian tend to exaggerate more than western societies. On the other hand, expressing emotions is different for different genders. Stennes, and Mostafa Rahimi Rad: A Sociolinguistic Approach to the Persian Native Speakers’ Strategies for Expressing Sorrow and Happiness: A Comparison of the Gender Differences
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