Investigating condolence speech acts by Iranian to an obituary post in social media; Instagram

There are some categories of speech acts to use in different occasions for various purposes, namely, requests, apologies, advices, refusals, invitations, compliments, etc. offering condolences are considered another category of speech acts. This study investigated the way people use condolence speech acts in social media, Instagram, in Iranian context. The researchers chose the lately deceased famous puppeteer, to check the comments posted on four of her acquaintances obituary posts for the deceased. The comments were coded as Al-Shbul and Maros (2013) did them into seven categories: 1)Praying for God’s mercy and forgiveness to be with the deceased, 2)Recitation of Quranic verses, 3)Enumerating the virtues of the deceased, 4)Expressing shock and grief, 5)Offering condolences, 6)Realizing that death is a natural part of life, 7)Using proverbs and saying, and one category was added namely, using foreign condolence phrases which was absent in Al-sabuh and Maros (2013), Pishghadam and Morady Moghadam (2012). The chi-square formula was conducted to check the frequency of the items in the taxonomies. The results indicated that the most typical comments were attributed to communal sympathy, faith and religious beliefs.