Indirect speech acts in modern English discourse. - Косвенные речевые акты в современном английском дискурсе

Morgan calls “short-circuited implicatures”: implicatures that

once were motivated by explicit reasoning but which now do not

have to be calculated explicitly anymore.

There is an opinion that indirect speech acts must be

considered as language polysemy, e.g. “Why not + verb?”

construction serves as a formal marker of not just the illocutive

function of a question, 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 can always be inferred from its literal meaning. But

according to the relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson

[46, 113], the process of interpretation of indirect speech acts

does not at all differ from the process of interpretation of

direct speech acts. Furthermore, it is literal utterances that

are often marked and sound less natural than utterances with an

indirect meaning. For example, the utterance “She is a snake.”

having an implicit meaning sounds more natural than “She is

spiteful.” Exclamatory utterances “It’s not exactly a picniс

weather!” and “It’s not a day for cricket!” sound more

expressive and habitual than the literal utterance “What nasty

weather we are having!” The interrogative construction

expressing a request “Could you put on your black dress?” is more

customary than the performative: “I suggest that you should put

on your black dress.”

To summarize: there is no unanimity among linguists

studying indirect speech 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 final word has not yet been

said.

3. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN

A DISCOURSE

Speech act theories considered above treat an indirect

speech act as the product of a single utterance based on a single

sentence with only one illocutionary point - thus becoming a

pragmatic extension to sentence grammars. In real life, however,

we do not use isolated utterances: an utterance functions as part

of a larger intention or plan. In most interactions, the

interlocutors each have an agenda; and to carry out the plan, the

illocutions within a discourse are ordered with respect to one

another. Very little work has been done on the contribution of

the illocutions within utterances to the development of

understanding of a discourse.

As Labov and Fanshel pointed out, “most utterances can be

seen as performing several speech acts simultaneously ...

Conversation is not a chain of utterances, but rather a matrix of

utterances and actions bound together by a web of understandings

and reactions ... In conversation, participants use language to

interpret to each other the significance of the actual and

potential events that surround them and to draw the consequences

for their past and future actions.” (Labov, Fanshel 1977: 129).

Attempts to break 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 a chemist contains indirectness

(see table 4.1).

Table 4.1

Indirect speech acts of an ordinary formal dialogue

|Participant |Utterance |Indirect speech acts |

|Customer |Do you have any | Seeks to establish preparatory |

| |Actifed? |condition for |

| | |transaction and thereby implies the |

| | |intention to |

| | |buy on condition that Actifed is |

| | |available. |

|Chemist |Tablets or | Establishes a preparatory |

| |linctus? |condition for the |

| | |transaction by offering a choice of |

| | |product. |

|Customer |Packet of | Requests one of products offered,|

| |tablets, |initiates |

| |please. |transaction. In this context, even |

| | |without |

| | |“please”, the noun phrase alone will |

| | |function as |

| | |a requestive. |

|Chemist |That'll be | A statement disguising a request |

| |$18.50. |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. |

Discourse always displays one or more perlocutionary

functions. Social interaction predominates in everyday chitchat;

informativeness in academic texts; persuasiveness in political

speeches; and entertainment in novels. But many texts combine

some or all these functions in varying degrees to achieve their

communicational purpose. For instance, although an academic text

is primarily informative, it also tries to persuade readers to

reach a certain point of view; it needs to be entertaining enough

to keep the reader's attention; 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 the strategy for its

interpretation: we do not expect nonliterality when reading

medical prescriptions. For every genre there is an illocutionary

standard. For example, a letter of recommendation is an alloy of

declarations and expressives. A request added to it converts it

into a petition whereas a detailed list of facts from the

person’s life turns it into a biography. In canonized texts, lack

of “moulds” has a significant pragmatic load.

The illocutionary standard of a text depends on the

communicative situation and macrocontext. For example, in “The

Centaur” by John Updike there is an obituary whose indirect

meaning is much wider than the literal meaning (chapter 5 of the

novel).

On the whole, the contribution of the illocutions of

individual utterances to the understanding of macrostructures

within texts is sorely in need of study.

4. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN

Pragmatic research reveals that the main types of speech

acts can be found in all natural languages. Yet, some speech acts

are specific for a group of languages or even for a certain

language. For instance, the English question “Have you got a

match?” is a request while the Ukrainian utterance “Чи маєте Ви

сірники?” possesses two meanings: either the speaker is asking

you for matches or offering them to you. Only the utterance “У

Вас немає сірників?” having interrogatory 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 direct speech acts of advice.

Seeing off guests, the Ukrainians often use causative

verbs, e.g. “Заходіть! Телефонуйте! Пишіть!” This communicative

behaviour often provokes an inadequate reaction of foreigners:

instead of “Дякую!” prescribed by the Ukrainian speech etiquette

they say: “With great pleasure!” or ask “When exactly should I

come? What for?”

Mikhail Goldenkov describes a typical indirect speech act

used in US public transport [3,82]. If a passenger wants to get

off a crowded bus, s/he should not directly question the

passengers blocking the way if they are getting off or not (like

it is usually done in Ukraine). A direct speech act would be

taken as meddling in other people’s personal matters. A

request to make way must be disguised as a statement: “Excuse me,

I am getting off” or as a question in the first person: “Could I

get off please?”

Indirect speech acts must always be taken into account when

learning a foreign language. In many cases they make the

communicative center and sound much more natural than direct

speech acts. In particular, at English lessons in Ukraine much

attention is given to direct inverted questions. Furthermore,

often only such questions are considered to be correct, and as a

result students get accustomed to conversations reminding a

police quest: “Have you got an apartment?”, “Where does your

father work?”, etc. However, when asking for information, native

speakers do not often use direct speech acts because they are not

suitable from the point of view of speech etiquette. To master

the art of conversation, students must be able to use indirect

declarative questions, e.g. “I’d like to know if you are

interested in football” or “I wonder if we could be pen-pals”,

etc.

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7



Реклама
В соцсетях
рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать