Kavoshnameh in Persian Language and Literature Vol 20, No43, Winter 2020

The Analysis of Sultan Amir Masoud’s letter to

Kharazmshah Altontash from The History of Beyhaqi

based on speech act theory of John Rogers Searle

Zahra Samaie Master of Persian Language and Literature, Al-Mustafa Al-Alimi School

Dr.Mohammad Javad Erfan Beizaie

Assistant Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Payame

Noor University of Mashhad

Dr. Hssan Bassak

Associate Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Payame

Noor University of Mashhad

Abstract

Literature texts have numerous meaning layers and pragmatic

interpretations. The reader must extract the intent of the writer or narrator

from the text. Human minds use different processes consciously and

unconsciously to achieve this goal. The specialists of multiple fields in

humanities, such as linguistics and its subsets have had a high regard for

how to extract meanings and the hidden intent in a text from the past. The

notion of speech act is one of the solutions for understanding the hidden

meanings of a text. The history of Beyhaqi is one of the ancient texts which

is considered as one of the best literary texts because of its style that

indicates the fluency and excellent ability of its writer, Beyhaqi. This

research has analyzed “Sultan Amir Masoud’s letter to kharazmshah

Altontash” from the history of Beyhaqi based on speech act theory. This

notion is constantly used in applied semantics and is located within

discourse analysis domain. In this letter, the writer has used more directive

acts compared with fewer expressive acts that indicates various meanings.

Keywords: speech act; discourse analysis; The history of Beyhaqi; John

Rogers Searle; Sultan Masoud.

Date of receiving: 2017/4/10 Date of final accepting: 2018/12/21 1 - email of responsible writer: samaeez@gmail.com