Реферат: Косвенные речевые акты в современном английском языке

CONTENTS  INTRODUCTION…………….……………………………………….31. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUSFUNCTION…………5

2. WHY DO SPEAKERS HAVE TO BE INDIRECT?…………………..7

2.1. The cooperative principle…………………………………………….7

2.2. The theory of politeness ……………………………………………...8

3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS   

   AND“DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?…………………………….10

3.1. The inference theory………………………………………………...10

3.2. Indirectspeech acts as idioms?…………………………………...…12

3.3. Other approaches to the problem……………………………………13

 

4.ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN A   

    DISCOURSE………………………………………………………….14

          5.INDIRECT SPEECH ACTSIN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN……..16

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          6.EXAMPLES OF INDIRECTSPEECH ACTS IN MODERN 

   ENGLISHDISCOURSE………..…………………………………….18

6.1. Fiction………………………………………………………………18

6.2. Publicism……………………………………………………………20

6.3. Advertising………………………………………………………….21

6.4. Anecdotes…………………………………………………………...21

          7.INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AS A YARDSTICK OF COMMUNI-            CATIVE MATURITY AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING …..….23

            CONCLUSIONS……….……………………………………………..25

   РЕЗЮМЕ……………….…………………………………………….27

  LITERATURE….…………………………………………………….28

INTRODUCTION                                                            “Agreat deal can be said in the study of                                                                                 language without studying speech acts,                                                              but any such purelyformal theory is                                                             necessarily incomplete. It would be as if                                                            baseball were studied only as a formal                                                             systemof rules and not as a game.”

                                                                    John Rogers Searle

In the late 1950s, the Oxford philosopher John Austin gave some lectureson howspeakers “do thingswith words” and so invented a theory of “speech acts”[10, 40]which now occupies thecentral place in pragmatics(pragmatics is the study of how we use language to communicate in aparticular context).  Austinhighlighted the initialcontrast between the constative andthe performative.Whileconstatives describe a state of affairs,performatives (explicit and implicit)have the potential to bring about a change insome state of affairs. Classicalexamples of performatives include the naming of a ship, the joining oftwo persons in marriage, and the sentencing of a criminalby an authorised person. Austin distinguished between the locution of a speech act (the wordsuttered),its illocution (the intention of the speakerin making the utterance) and its perlocution(itseffects, intended or otherwise).  Whereas constativestypically have truthconditionsto comply with,speech acts mustsatisfy certain “felicity conditions”in order to count as an action: there must be a conventional procedure; thecircumstances and people must be appropriate;  the procedure must be executed correctly andcompletely; often, the persons must have the requisite thoughts,feelings, etc.

John Austin’s theory of speech acts was generalized tocover all utterances by a student of Austin's, John Rogers Searle [43, 69].Searle showed that we perform speech acts every time we speak. For example,asking “What's the time?” we areperforming the speech act of making a request. Turningan erstwhile constative into an explicit performativelooks like this:“It is now ten o’clock” means “Ihereby pronounce that it is ten o’ clock in the morning.”

   In sucha situation, the original constative versusperformativedistinction becomesuntenable: all speech is performative.The important distinction is not between the performative and the constative,but between the different kinds of speech acts being performed, that is between direct and indirect speech acts.  Searle's hypothesiswasthat inindirect speech acts, the speaker communicates the non-literal as well asthe literal meaning to the hearer. This new pragmatic trend was named   intentionalismbecause it takes into account the initial intention of the speaker and itsinterpretation by the hearer.

Actualityof research:

The problem of indirect speech acts has got a greattheoretical meaning for analysis of the form/function relation in language: thesame form performs more than one function.   To generate an indirect speech act, thespeaker has to use qualitatively different types of knowledge, both linguisticand extralinguistic (interactive and encyclopaedic), as well as the ability toreason  [45,97].A number of theories try to explain why we make indirect speech actsand how we understand their non-literal meaning, but the research is still farfrom being complete.

Thepractical value of researchlies in the fact that it isimpossible to reach a high level of linguistic competence without understandingthe nature of indirect speech acts and knowing typical indirect speech acts ofa particular language.  

Thetasks of research:

1)<span Times New Roman""> 

analysis of the theories onindirect speech acts;     

2)<span Times New Roman""> 

finding out whyinterlocutors generate indirect speech acts instead of saying exactly what theymean;

3)<span Times New Roman""> 

comparing typical indirectspeech acts in English and in Ukrainian;

4)<span Times New Roman""> 

providing examples ofindirect speech acts in various communicational situations.

Theobject of researchis a speech act asa communicationalaction that speakersperform by saying things in a certain way in a certain context.  

Thesubject of research is an indirect speech act as themain way in which thesemantic content of a sentence can fail to determine the full force and contentof the illocutionary act being performed in using the sentence.

Methodsof researchinclude critical analysis of scientific workson the subject, analysis of speech of native English speakers in variouscommunicational situations, analysis of speech behavior of literary personagescreated by modern British and American writers.

        

 

1.<span Times New Roman""> 

INDIRECTSPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION

 

                                                   “Communication is successful not when        

                                                      hearersrecognize the linguistic meaning of the

                                                     utterance, but when they infer the speaker's          

                                                     meaning from it.”

                                                                         Dan Sperber andDeidre Wilson

 

Most of whathuman beings say is aimed atsuccess of perlocutionaryacts, but because perlocutionary effects are behavioural,cognitive, or emotional responses they are not linguisticobjects. What linguists can properly look at, however, are the intentions ofspeakers to bring about certain perlocutionary effectswhich are called illocutionary intentions. 

The basis of a speech act is the speaker’s intentionto influence the hearer in a desired way. The intention can be manifested andlatent. According to O.G. Pocheptsov [13,74],latent intentions cannot be linguistically analyzed while manifested intentionscan be divided into evident and inferable. The illocutinary intention ofindirect speech acts is inferable.

 Threebroad illocutionary categories are normally identified – a statement,a question and a command/request — having typical realisations indeclarative,interrogative andimperative verb forms. But sometimes the syntactic form of a sentence is not a good guide to theact it is performing. In indirect speech acts the agreement between the intendedfunction and the realised form breaksdown,andthe outward(locutionary) form ofan utterance does not correspond with the intendedillocutionary force of the speech act which itperforms [37, 263].In indirection a singleutterance is the performance of one illocutionary act by way of performinganother. Indirect speech acts havetwo illocutionary forces [45,195].

Searle’s classical example of an indirect speech actis the utterance “Can you pass the salt?”Without breaking any linguistic norms we can regard it as a general questionand give a yes/no answer. But most often hearers interpret it as arequest.    Likewise, the utterance “There's a fly in your soup” may be asimple assertion but, in a context, a warning not to drink the soup. Thequestion “What's the time?” might,when one is looking for an excuse to get rid of an unwelcome guest, be intendedas a suggestion that the guest should leave. Analogously, thestatement “I wouldn't do this if I wereyou”has the congruent force ofan imperative: “Don't do it!”

In his works Searle gives otherinteresting examples of indirect speech acts:Why don’t you be quiet? It would be a goodidea if you gave me the money now. How many times have I told you (must I tellyou) not to eat with your fingers? I would appreciate it if you could make lessnoise. In some contextsthese utterances combine two illocutionary forces and sound idiomatic, eventhough they are not idioms in the proper sense of the term.  Each utterance contains an imperative(secondary illocution) realized by means of a question or a statement (primaryillocution).   

PaulGriceillustratesindirectnessby the following utterances[4, 22]:“There is a garage around thecorner”used to tell someone whereto get petrol, and “Mr. X's command of Englishis excellent, and his attendance has been regular”,giving the high points in a letter of recommendation. Asimple example of an indirect speech act gives B.Russel: “When parents say ‘Puddle!’ to their child, what they meanis ‘Don’t step into it!’ [41, 195].These are  examples in which what is meant is notdetermined by what is said.

 Wecan make a request or givepermission by way of making a statement, e.g.by uttering “I am getting thirsty.”or “It doesn't matter to me.” Wecan make a statement or give an order by way of asking a question, such as “Will the sun rise tomorrow?”or “Can you clean up your room?”When an illocutionary act isperformed indirectly, it is performed by way of performing some other onedirectly.

It has beenfound that indirect expressives, directivesand representatives composethe most numerous group ofindirect speech acts[11, 23].

The study ofindirect speech acts has mostly dealt with requests invarious guises. Jerrold M. Sadock identified some exotic species: “whimperatives” -indirect requestsin the form of a question, e.g. “Can't you (please) dosomething?”and “Do something, will you?”;  “queclaratives” -the speaker directly questions and indirectly makes anassertion:“Does anyone doA any more?”meaning«Nobody does A any more»; “requestions”arequiz questions to which the speaker knows the answer,e.g. Columbus discovered America in ...?[42, 168].

Summarizing, we can say that indirectionis themain way in which the semantic content of a sentence can fail to determine thefull force and content of the illocutionary act being performed in using thesentence.

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WHY DO SPEAKERS HAVE TO BEINDIRECT?

                                                  “Everything that is worded too directly nowadays                                     

                                                     runsthe risk of being socially condemned.”   

                                                                                                  Ye. Klyuev

 

2.1.The cooperative principle

         An insight intoindirectness is based on the Cooperative Principle developed by Paul Grice [4,14-76]: languageusers tacitly agree to cooperate by making their contributions to the conversationto further it in the desired direction. Grice endeavoured toestablish a set of general principles explaining how language users conveyindirect meanings (so-called conversational implicatures, i.e. implicit meanings which have to be inferred fromwhat is being said explicitly, on the basis of logical deduction). Adherence tothis principle entails that speakerssimultaneouslyobserve 4 maxims:

 1) Maxim of Quality:

— Do not say what you believe to be false.

      — Do not say that for whichyou lack adequate evidence.

2) Maxim of Relevance:

     — Be relevant.

3) Maxim of Quantity:

     — Make your contribution asinformative as required.

     — Do not make yourcontribution more informative than is required.

4) Maxim of Manner:

     — Avoid obscurity ofexpression.

     — Avoid ambiguity.

     — Be brief.

      — Be orderly.

This general description of the normalexpectations we have in conversations helps to explain a number of regularfeatures in the way people say things. For instance, the commonexpressions  «Well, to make a long story short» or «I won't bore you with the details» indicate an awarenessof the maxims of quantity and manner. Because we assume that other speakers are followingthese maxims, we often draw inferences based on this assumption.

At one level, cooperative behaviour between theinteractants means that the conversational maxims are being followed; but atanother and more important level, cooperative behaviour still operates even ifthe conversational maxims are apparently broken.   For instance,when thespeaker blatantly and openly says something which appears to beirrelevantand ambiguous (flouts the maxims of relevanceand manner), itcan be assumed that s/he reallyintends to communicate something which is relevantandunambiguous,but does so implicitly:

“ — I don't suppose you couldmanage tomorrow evening?

  — How do you like to eat?

            — Actually I rather enjoy cookingmyself.”[J. Fowles]

The second remark, instead of being a direct answer (a statement), is aquestion formally not connected with the first remark.  The maxims of relevance and manner areflouted. The inferable implicature is: “Yes,I can.”Analogously, the implication of the third remark is inferred: “I invite you to have dinner at my place.”                                                                    

  If we were forced to draw only logicalinferences, life would be a lot more difficult. Conversations would take longersince wewouldhave to say things which reasonable language-userscurrently infer.    

Searle adds one more conversational maxim [45, 126]: “Speakidiomatically unless you have a reason not to.” He exemplifies this maxim likethis: if we say archaically “Knowest thou him who callethhimself Richard Nixon?” (not idiomatically), the utterance will not beperceived as a usual question “Do you know Richard Nixon?”  

  An important difference betweenimplicatures and what is said directly is that the speaker can always renouncethe implicatures s/he hinted at. For example, in “Love and friendship” byA.Lourie the protagonist answers to a lady asking him to keep her secret: “A gentleman never talks of such things”.Later the lady finds out that he did let out her secret, and the protagonistjustifies himself saying: “I never said Iwas a gentleman.”

  Implicatures put aquestion of insincerity and hypocrisy people resort to by means of a language(it is not by chance that George Orwell introduced the word “to double speak” in his novel “1984”).No doubt, implicatures are always present in human communication.   V.Bogdanov notes that numerous implicaturesraise the speaker’s and the hearer’s status in each other’s eyes: the speakersounds intelligent and knowledgeable about the nuances of communication, andthe hearer realizes that the speaker relies on his shrewdness. “Communicationon the implicature level is a prestigious type of verbal communication. Itis  widely used by educated people: tounderstand implicatures, the hearer must have a proper intellectual level.”  (Богданов 1990:21).

The ancient rhetorician Demetrius declared the following: “People whounderstand what you do not literally say are not just your audience. They areyour witnesses, and well-wishing witnesses at that. You gave them an occasionto show their wit, and they think they are shrewd and quick-witted. But if you“chew over” your every thought, your hearers will decide your opinion of theirintellect is rather low.”    (Деметрий 1973:273).

2.2.The theory of politeness

Another line of explanation ofindirectness is provided by asociolinguistictheory of politeness developed in the late 1970s. Its founder Geoffrey Leech introduced the politenessprinciple: people should minimize the expression of impolite beliefs andmaximize the expression of polite beliefs [36, 102]. According to the politenesstheory,speakers avoid threats to the “face”of the hearersby various forms ofindirectness, and thereby “implicate”their meaningsrather than assert them directly. The politeness theory isbased on the notion that participants are rational beings with two kindsof “facewants”connected with their public self-image[26, 215]:

• positive face — a desire to be appreciated and valued by others; desirefor approval;

• negative face — concern for certain personal rights and freedoms, suchasautonomy to choose actions, claims on territory,and so on; desire to be  unimpeded.

Some speech acts (“face threatening acts”) intrinsically threaten the faces.Ordersand requests, for instance, threaten the negative face, whereascriticism and disagreementthreatenthe positiveface. The perpetrator therefore must either avoid such actsaltogether (which may be impossible for a host ofreasons, including concern forher/hisown face) or find ways of performing them withmitigating of their facethreatening  effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a son tohis father) “Are you using the cartonight?”counts as a face-respectingstrategy because it leaves room for fatherto refuse by saying “Sorry, it has already been taken(rather than the face-threatening “You may not useit”). In that sense, the speaker’sand the hearer’sfacesarebeing attended to.

Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in its qualitativeaspect  (what is considered to be polite),but in its quantitative aspect as well (to what degree various languageconstructions realize the politeness principle). Of course there are absolutemarkers of politeness, e.g. “please”, butthey are not numerous. Most of language units gain a certain degree ofpoliteness in a context.

 

3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECHACTS AND “DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?

It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech actsthe relationship betweenthe words being utteredand the illocutionary force is often oblique. Forexample, the sentence “This is a pigsty”might be used nonliterallyto state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demandindirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used literally anddirectly, say to describe a certain area of a barnyard, the content of itsutterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning-in particular, the meaningof the word “this”does not determine whicharea is being referred to.  

How do we manage to define the illocution of an utterance if we cannotdo that by its syntactic form? There are several theories trying to answer thisquestion.

3.1.<span Times New Roman"">                  

The inference theory

The basic steps in theinference of an indirect speech act are as follows  [37, 286-340]:

I.<span Times New Roman"">   

Theliteral meaning and force of the utterance arecomputed by, and available to, the participants.The key to understanding of the literal meaning isthe syntactical form of the utterance.

II. There issome indication that the literal meaning is inadequate (“a trigger” of  an indirectspeech act).

  According to Searle, in indirectspeech acts the speakerperformsone illocutionary act but intends thehearer to inferanother illocution by relying on their mutually shared background information,both linguistic and nonlinguistic,as well as on generalpowers of rationality and inference, that is onillocutionary forceindicating devices[43, 73].     The illocutionary point of anutterance can bediscovered by an inferential process that attends to thespeaker'sprosody,  the context of utterance, the form of the sentence, the tense and mood of verbs, knowledge of the languageitself and of conversational conventions, and general encyclopaedicknowledge. The speaker knows this and speaks accordingly, aware thatthe hearer — as a competent social being and language user — will recognizethe implications [32,41].  So, indirectness relies onconversational implicature: there is overwhelming evidence that speakers expecthearers to draw inferences from everything that is uttered.  It follows that thehearer willbegin the inferential process immediately on being presented with the locution.Under the cooperative principle, there is a convention that the speakerhas some purpose for choosing this very utterancein thisparticular contextinstead of maintaining silence or generating another utterance. The hearertries to guess this purpose, and in doing so, considersthe context,beliefs about normal behaviour in this context, beliefs about the speaker,and the presumed common ground.

 The fact that divergence betweenthe form and the contents of an utterance can vary within certain limits helpsto discover indirect speech acts: an order can be disguised as a request, apiece of advice or a question, but it is much less probable as a compliment.

III. There are principles that allow us to derive the relevantindirect forcefrom theliteral meaning and the context.

Searle  suggests that theseprinciples can be stated within his theory of felicity conditions forspeech acts[44, 38].

For example, accordingto Searle’s theory, a commandor a requesthas the following felicity conditions:

1. Askingor statingthe preparatory condition:

Can you pass the salt?The hearer'sability to perform an actionis being asked.

Literally it is aquestion;non-literallyit is arequest.

2. Askingor statingthe propositional content:

You're standing on my foot. Would you kindly get off my foot?

Literally it is astatementor a question; non-literally it is arequest.

3. Statingthe sincerity condition:

I'd like you to do this for me.   

Literally it is astatement;non-literallyit is arequest.

4. Statingor askingthegood/overriding reasons for doing an action:

You had better go now. Hadn't you better go now?Why not go now? 

Literally it is astatementor a question; non-literally it is arequest.

5. Askingif apersonwants/wishes to performanaction:

 Would you mind helping me withthis? Wouldyou mind  if I asked you if you could write me a reference?

Literally it is aquestion; non-literally it is arequest (in the last examplean explicit directive verb is embedded).

All these indirect acts have several common features:

1.<span Times New Roman""> 

Imperative force is not partof the literal meaning of these sentences.

2.<span Times New Roman""> 

These sentences are not ambiguous.

3.<span Times New Roman""> 

These sentences are conventionally used to make requests. They oftenhave «please» at end orpreceding the verb.

4. These sentences are notidioms, but are idiomatically used as requests.

5. Thesesentences can have literal interpretations.

6. The literal meanings aremaintained when they question the physicalability:Can you pass the salt? — No,it’s too far from me.I can’t reach it.

7. Both the literal and thenon-literal illocutionary acts are made whenmaking a report on the utterance:

The speaker:Can you come to my party tonight?

The hearer:I have to get up early tomorrow.

Report: He said he couldn't come. OR:He said he had to get up early next morning.

Aproblem of the inference theory is that syntactic forms witha similar meaning often show differences in the ease in whichthey trigger indirect speechacts:

a)Can you reach the salt?

b)Are you able to reach the salt?

c)Is it the case that you at present have theability to reach the salt?

While (a) ismost likely to be used as a request, (b) is less likely, and (c) ishighly unlikely, although they seem to expressthe same proposition.

Another drawback of theinference theory is the complexity of the algorithm it offers for recognizingand deciphering the true meaning of indirect speech acts. If the hearer had topass all the three stages every time he faced an indirect speech act,identifying the intended meaning would be time-consuming whereas normally werecognize each other’s communicative intentions quickly and easily.

3.2. Indirect speech acts as idioms?

Anotherlineof explanation of indirect speech acts was brought forward by Jerrold Sadock [42, 197].According to his theory,indirect speech acts areexpressions based onan idiomatic meaning addedtotheir literal meaning (just like theexpression “to pushupdaisies”has two meanings:“to increasethe distance of specimens of Bellis perennis from the center of theearth by employing force”and “tobedead”). Of course, we donot have specific idiomshere, but rather  general idiom schemes. For example, the scheme “Can you + verb?”is idiomaticfor commandsand requests.  

However, the idiomatichypothesis is questionable as a general strategy. One problem is that areactionto an indirect speechact can be composite to both the directandthe indirect speech act, e.g.

The speaker:Can you tell me thetime?

The hearer:Yes, it’s threeo’clock.

We never find this type of reaction to the literal and the idiomaticintepretation of an idiom:

The speaker:Is he pushing thedaisies by now?

Hearer 1: Yes/no(the idiomatic meaningis taken into account).

Hearer 2: Depends what you mean. As a gardener, yes(the literal meaning is taken into account).

Another problem is that there is a multitude of different (and seeminglysemanticallyrelated) forms thatbehave in a similar way:

a)Can you pass me thesalt?

b)Could you pass me the salt?

c)May I have the salt?

d)May I ask you to pass the salt?

e)Would you be so kind to pass the salt?

f)Would you mind passing the salt?

Some of these expressions are obviously semantically related (e.g.can/could, would you be so kind/wouldyoumind), and it seems that it is this semantic relation that makes them expressthe same indirect speechact.This is different for classical idioms, where the phrasing itself matters:

 a)topushthe daisies “to bedead” vs.topush the roses

b)tokickthe bucket “to die”vs. to kick the barrel.

Hence, a defender of the idiom hypothesis must assume a multitude ofidiom schemes, someof which areobviously closely semanticallyrelated. 

 Summarizing,we can say that there are certain cases of indirect speech acts that haveto be seen as idiomatized syntactic constructions (for example,English why not-questions.) Buttypically, instances of indirectspeechacts should not be analyzed as simple idioms.   

3.3.<span Times New Roman"">        

Other approaches to the problem

The difference of the idiomatic and inference approaches can beexplained by different understanding of the role of convention incommunication. The former theory overestimates it while the latterunderestimates it, and both reject the qualitative diversity ofconventionality.  Correcting thisshortcoming, Jerry Morgan writes about two types of convention in indirectspeech acts[39,261]:conventions of language and conventions of usage. The utterance “Can you pass the salt?” cannot be considered as a regular idiom  (conventions of language), but its use for anindirect request is undoubtedly conventional, i.e. habitual for everyday speechthat is always characterized by a certain degree of ritualization. 

In accordance with this approach the function of an indirect speech actis conventionally fixed, and an inference process is not needed.    Conventionsof usageexpress what Morgancalls “short-circuitedimplicatures”: implicatures that once were motivated by explicitreasoning butwhich now donot have to be calculated explicitly anymore.

There is an opinion that indirect speech acts must be considered aslanguage polysemy, e.g. “Why not + verb?”construction serves as a formal marker of not just the illocutive function of aquestion, but of that of a request,e.g. “Why not clean the room right now?”

According to Grice and Searle, the implicit meaning of an utterance canalways be inferred from its literal meaning. But according to the relevancetheory developed by Sperber and Wilson [46, 113], the process of interpretationof indirect speech acts does not at all differ from the process ofinterpretation of direct speech acts. Furthermore, it is literal utterancesthat are often marked and sound less natural than utterances with an indirectmeaning. For example, the utterance “She is a snake.”having an implicit meaningsounds more natural than “She is spiteful.”Exclamatory utterances “It’s not exactlya picniс weather!” and “It’snot a day for cricket!” soundmore expressive and habitual than the literalutterance “Whatnasty weather we are having!”  Theinterrogative construction expressing a request “Could you put on your black dress?” is more customary than theperformative: “I suggest that you shouldput on your black dress.”     

To summarize: there is no unanimity among linguists studying indirectspeech acts as to how we discover them in each other’s speech and “extract”their meaning. Every theory has got its strong and weak points, and the finalword has not yet been said.

 

4.<span Times New Roman""> 

ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUALUTTERANCES WITHIN A DISCOURSE

Speech acttheoriesconsidered above treat an indirect speechact as the product of a single utterance based on asingle sentence with only one illocutionary point — thus becoming a pragmaticextension to sentence grammars.  In reallife, however, we do not use isolated utterances: an utterancefunctions as part of a larger intention or plan. In most interactions, theinterlocutors each have an agenda; and to carry out the plan, the illocutionswithin a discourse are ordered with respect to one another.   Very little work has been done on thecontribution of the illocutions within utterances to the development ofunderstanding of a discourse.

As Labov and Fanshel pointedout, “most utterances can be seen as performing several speech actssimultaneously… Conversation is not a chain of utterances, but rather amatrix of utterances and actions bound together by a web of understandings andreactions… In conversation, participants use language to interpret to eachother the significance of the actual and potential events that surround themand to draw the consequences for their past and future actions.”(Labov, Fanshel1977: 129).

Attempts tobreak out of the sentence-grammar mould were made by Labov and Fanshel [35],Edmondson [29],Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper[24]. Even an ordinary and rather formal dialogue between a customer and achemist contains indirectness (see table 4.1).

                                                                                Table4.1 

Indirect speech acts of an ordinary formal dialogue

PRIVATEParticipant

Utterance

Indirect speech acts

Customer

Do you have any

Actifed?

    Seeks to establish preparatory condition for

    transaction and thereby implies the intention to

    buy on condition that Actifed is available.

Chemist

Tablets or linctus?

     Establishes a preparatory condition for the

     transaction by offering a choice of product.

Customer

Packet of tablets,

please.

     Requests one of products offered, initiates

     transaction. In this context, even without  

     “please”, the noun phrase alone will function as

      a requestive.

Chemist

That'll be $18.50.

    A statement disguising a request for payment to

    execute   the transaction.

Customer   

OK.

    Agrees to contract of sale thereby fulfilling

t   buyer's side of the bargain.

Chemist

Have a nice day!

    Fulfills seller's side of the bargain and

   concludes interaction with a conventional farewell.

 Discoursealways displaysone ormore perlocutionary functions.Social interactionpredominates in everydaychitchat; informativenessin academic texts;persuasiveness in political speeches; and entertainment in novels. But manytexts combine some or all these functions in varying degrees to achieve theircommunicationalpurpose. For instance, although an academic text isprimarily informative, it also tries to persuade readers to reach a certainpoint of view; it needs to be entertaining enough to keep the reader'sattention; and most academic texts try to get the reader on the author’s side through social interactive techniques such as use of authorial we to include the reader.  

The genre of the text shapes thestrategy for its interpretation: we do not expect nonliterality when readingmedical prescriptions. For every genre there is an illocutionary standard. Forexample, a letter of recommendation is an alloy of declarations andexpressives. A request added to it converts it into a petition whereas adetailed list of facts from the person’s life turns it into a biography. Incanonized texts, lack of “moulds” has a significant pragmatic load.

The illocutionary standard of a textdepends on the communicative situation and macrocontext. For example, in “TheCentaur” by John Updike there is an obituary whose indirect meaning is muchwider than the literal meaning (chapter 5 of the novel).

On the whole, the contribution of the illocutions of individualutterances to the understanding of macrostructures within texts is sorely inneed of study.

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS INENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN

Pragmatic research reveals that themain types of speech acts can be found in all natural languages. Yet, somespeech acts are specific for a group of languages or even for a certainlanguage. For instance, the English question “Have you got a match?” is a request while the Ukrainian utterance“Чимаєте Висірники?” possessestwo meanings: either the speaker is asking you for matches or offering them toyou. Only the utterance “У Вас немає сірників?”havinginterrogatory intonation and  stressed “немає” is unambiguously a request. 

Offering advice, the Ukrainians prefer not to use modal verbs  (могти, хотіти) that would make up an indirect speech act. Preference is given to directspeech acts of advice.    

Seeing off guests, the Ukrainians often use causative verbs, e.g. “Заходіть! Телефонуйте! Пишіть!”This communicative behaviour often provokes aninadequate reaction of foreigners: instead of “Дякую!”  prescribed by theUkrainian speech etiquet

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