Delving into the Speech Act of Accusation: A Case of Persian and English Newspapers and Magazines

Abstract

The study of speech acts, which investigates an utterance as a functional unit in communication, began to influence greatly the teaching of language use. Numerous studies have been conducted on different kinds of speech acts in previous years. However, regarding literature, just one study has examined accusation speech act; therefore, this study intends to investigate the different types of accusation speech act used in Persian and English newspapers and magazines. To this end, 100 excerpts of reliable and popular newspapers and magazines in English and Persian, published from 2004 to 2014 were selected with the purpose of discovering the accusation units in them. Accusation units are the parts of excerpts which contains accusation sentences. The researchers used the Aristotle’s (1954, as cited in Demirdogen, 2010) modes of persuasion for coding the accusation units. It consists of three modes: Ethos, Pathos and Logos. The researchers also, employed the Kairos element in addition to Aristotle’s (1954) model in order to make the study more comprehensive. The chi-square formula was then utilized to find out whether there are any significant differences among the observed units. The findings revealed that there are significant differences between Persian and English newspapers and magazines in using accusation speech act. It was thus indicated that pathos was the most frequent accusation unit used in Persian newspapers and magazines while in English ones, logos was the most frequent one. Finally, the results were discussed and pedagogical implications were suggested in the context of second language learning.