Speech act is not‌ only for describing the events in real world, but also for doing things. Applying this approach, this paper studied the word of 'khonok' in Shahnameh, as an expressive and directive speech act.

First, we have introduced speech act theory and the works have applied this theory in Persian works. At the end, all 'khonks' in shahnameh have been considered and categorized. 'khonok' have repeated 42 times in shahnameh and the results show that ' khonok' has expressive and directive speech acts and also has different functions and meanings in each act. It's worth to note that if we change our point of view, we will change our category; because there is a narrow border between their functions and meanings. This paper is the first one that has used pragmatics approach for studying the different meanings and functions of a word in Ferdowsi Shahnameh.