Abstract

The speech act of advice, despite its relatively accepted definition, takes on different forms in various social contexts. Previous research has primarily focused on institutional and non-intimate contexts (such as health counseling and student guidance), while the investigation of this speech act in the intimate context of marital relationships, particularly in literary texts, has been neglected. This study aims to analyze the pragmatic application of advice in marital dialogues across ten plays by Akbar Radi, relying on Hinkel's (1997) classification framework—which categorizes advice into direct, cautious, and indirect. Data were collected using a qualitative method and guided content analysis based on the theoretical framework, and were analyzed using inter-rater reliability.

The findings revealed that, first, all advice in this context is "unsolicited." Second, unlike in formal contexts, "direct advice" is the most frequently used type, accounting for 55.81% of instances, indicating the central role of "explicitness" in intimate marital relationships. Third, women give advice significantly more often (70.23%) than men. Furthermore, by identifying three new types of advice—"collective advice," "past-oriented advice," and "self-advice"—which do not fit into Hinkel's framework, this study demonstrates the need to expand this model to better align with intimate communicative contexts. This research not only contributes to the literature on advice in the Persian language but also offers a novel interpretation of Radi's dialogue writing by providing an analysis of power dynamics and intimacy in family discourse.