Exploring the Motif of Surprise in English and Persian: A Socio-Pragmatic Approach

Abstract

Different languages and cultures utilized various pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic resources in order to convey the realities of the world. The demarcation of these two aspects of language use can fathom out the socio-cultural and normative conventions as well as linguistic forms and strategies underlying the pragmatic import of the messages created in different communicative context. Accordingly, the present study aimed to explore the socio-pragmatic and pragmalinguistic variation in expression and realization of the motif of surprise produced by American and Iranian native speakers. For this purpose, 30 male and female American and Persian native speakers were selected from the university populations randomly, fifteen from each language. Subsequently, the analysis of the data revealed that considerable variations exist both in socio-pragmatic and pragmalinguistic aspects of surprise motif employed by the participants. Notably the findings indicated that there exist intricate correlations between pragmalinguistic resources that language users employ to achieve socio-pragmatic goals.