The speech act of gratitude in Russian and Persian linguacultures

The article studies the speech act of gratitude in Russian and Persian linguacultures. It describes the peculiarities of the linguistic means of verbalization of gratitude from the linguacultural and pragmalinguistic points of view. The study of these aspects is particularly important as it reveals the specific features of the speech behaviour of Russian and Persian speakers when expressing gratitude. The aim of this paper is to identify the similarities and differences in the ways of expressing gratitude and to systematize the linguistic means specific to this speech act in both languages. The study employed the methods of observation and experimentation as well as communicative-pragmatic and comparative analysis. The material under study includes 100 contexts in the Russian language and 100 contexts in Persian. The Russian-language material was taken from the Russian National Corpus. Due to the absence of such a corpus in Persian, the Persian- language material was based on our personal observations and records of oral speech. The study distinguishes four types of grammatical constructions in the Russian language in comparison with Persian that are used when expressing gratitude. The inventory of linguistic means conveying the content of gratitude in Persian linguaculture has been found to be much wider than in Russian. It has been revealed that, unlike the Russians, the Iranians express gratitude verbosely and supplement it with some other remarks, being manifestation of Iranian etiquette behaviour called taārof, ‘taarof’. Gratitude in Russian and Persian linguacultures is also manifested in well wishes. This research is the first to present the results of a comparative analysis of gratitude in Russian and Persian linguacultures, revealing the national and cultural specificity of this speech act.