摘要：AbstractSpeech acts include a wide range of functional units such as apologies, requests, compliments, invitations and so on. It is believed that being able to say the right thing to the right person at the right time would be a great accomplishment. Giving condolences is one area which needs to be taken into consideration to see how people express their sympathy when they hear a bad news. Since the speech act of condolence has been investigated in a limited range of studies namely by Fenton-Smith (2007), Samavarchi and Allami (2012) and Lotfollahi and Eslami-Rasekh (2011), the objective of the present study is to investigate giving condolences across English and Persian via short messages. To this end, about 60 short messages were gathered, 30 Persian and 30 English, and coded. The analysis of the data indicated that there is a difference in the way people give their condolences and it is argued that Persian messages are more direct and short and signs of religious culture can be seen in them. However, English messages are mostly indirect, sympathetic, and apologetic.
