Косвенные речевые акты в современном английском языке
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION…………….……………………………………….3
1. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION…………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. Indirect speech acts as idioms?…………………………………...…12
3.3. Other approaches to the problem……………………………………13
4. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN A
DISCOURSE………………………………………………………….14
5.INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN……..16
5.
6.EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN MODERN
ENGLISH DISCOURSE………..…………………………………….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
“A great deal can be said in the study of
language without studying speech acts,
but any such purely formal theory is
necessarily incomplete. It would be as if
baseball were studied only as a formal
system of rules and not as a game.”
John Rogers Searle
In the late 1950s, the Oxford philosopher John Austin gave
some lectures on how speakers “do things with words” and so
invented a theory of “speech acts” [10, 40] which now occupies
the central place in pragmatics (pragmatics is the study of how
we use language to communicate in a particular context). Austin
highlighted the initial contrast between the constative and the
performative. While constatives describe a state of affairs,
performatives (explicit and implicit) have the potential to bring
about a change in some state of affairs. Classical examples of
performatives include the naming of a ship, the joining of two
persons in marriage, and the sentencing of a criminal by an
authorised person. Austin distinguished between the locution of a
speech act (the words uttered), its illocution (the intention of
the speaker in making the utterance) and its perlocution (its
effects, intended or otherwise). Whereas constatives typically
have truth conditions to comply with, speech acts must satisfy
certain “felicity conditions” in order to count as an action:
there must be a conventional procedure; the circumstances and
people must be appropriate; the procedure must be executed
correctly and completely; often, the persons must have the
requisite thoughts, feelings, etc.
John Austin’s theory of speech acts was generalized to
cover 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 are performing
the speech act of making a request. Turning an erstwhile
constative into an explicit performative looks like this: “It is
now ten o’clock” means “I hereby pronounce that it is ten o’
clock in the morning.”
In such a situation, the original constative versus
performative distinction becomes untenable: 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 hypothesis was that in indirect
speech acts, the speaker communicates the non-literal as well as
the literal meaning to the hearer. This new pragmatic trend was
named intentionalism because it takes into account the initial
intention of the speaker and its interpretation by the hearer.
Actuality of research:
The problem of indirect speech acts has got a great
theoretical meaning for analysis of the form/function relation in
language: the same form performs more than one function. To
generate an indirect speech act, the speaker has to use
qualitatively different types of knowledge, both linguistic and
extralinguistic (interactive and encyclopaedic), as well as the
ability to reason [45, 97]. A number of theories try to explain
why we make indirect speech acts and how we understand their non-
literal meaning, but the research is still far from being
complete.
The practical value of research lies in the fact that it is
impossible to reach a high level of linguistic competence without
understanding the nature of indirect speech acts and knowing
typical indirect speech acts of a particular language.
The tasks of research:
analysis of the theories on indirect speech acts;
finding out why interlocutors generate indirect speech acts
instead of saying exactly what they mean;
comparing typical indirect speech acts in English and in
Ukrainian;
providing examples of indirect speech acts in various
communicational situations.
The object of research is a speech act as a communicational
action that speakers perform by saying things in a certain way in
a certain context.
The subject of research is an indirect speech act as the
main way in which the semantic content of a sentence can fail to
determine the full force and content of the illocutionary act
being performed in using the sentence.
Methods of research include critical analysis of scientific
works on the subject, analysis of speech of native English
speakers in various communicational situations, analysis of
speech behavior of literary personages created by modern British
and American writers.
INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION
“Communication is successful not when
hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the
utterance, but when they infer the speaker's
meaning from it.”
Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson
Most of what human beings say is aimed at success of
perlocutionary acts, but because perlocutionary effects are
behavioural, cognitive, or emotional responses they are not
linguistic objects. What linguists can properly look at, however,
are the intentions of speakers to bring about certain
perlocutionary effects which are called illocutionary intentions.
The basis of a speech act is the speaker’s intention to
influence the hearer in a desired way. The intention can be
manifested and latent. According to O.G. Pocheptsov [13,74],
latent intentions cannot be linguistically analyzed while
manifested intentions can be divided into evident and inferable.
The illocutinary intention of indirect speech acts is inferable.
Three broad illocutionary categories are normally
identified – a statement, a question and a command/request -
having typical realisations in declarative, interrogative and
imperative verb forms. But sometimes the syntactic form of a
sentence is not a good guide to the act it is performing. In
indirect speech acts the agreement between the intended function
and the realised form breaks down, and the outward (locutionary)
form of an utterance does not correspond with the intended
illocutionary force of the speech act which it performs [37,
263]. In indirection a single utterance is the performance of one
illocutionary act by way of performing another. Indirect speech
acts have two illocutionary forces [45, 195].
Searle’s classical example of an indirect speech act is the
utterance “Can you pass the salt?” Without breaking any
linguistic norms we can regard it as a general question and give
a yes/no answer. But most often hearers interpret it as a
request. Likewise, the utterance “There's a fly in your soup”
may be a simple assertion but, in a context, a warning not to
drink the soup. The question “What's the time?” might, when one
is looking for an excuse to get rid of an unwelcome guest, be
intended as a suggestion that the guest should leave.
Analogously, the statement “I wouldn't do this if I were you” has
the congruent force of an imperative: “Don't do it!”
In his works Searle gives other interesting examples of
indirect speech acts: Why don’t you be quiet? It would be a good
idea if you gave me the money now. How many times have I told you
(must I tell you) not to eat with your fingers? I would
appreciate it if you could make less noise. In some contexts
these utterances combine two illocutionary forces and sound
idiomatic, even though 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
(primary illocution).
Paul Grice illustrates indirectness by the following
utterances [4, 22]: “There is a garage around the corner” used to
tell someone where to get petrol, and “Mr. X's command of English
is excellent, and his attendance has been regular”, giving the
high points in a letter of recommendation. A simple example of an
indirect speech act gives B.Russel: “When parents say ‘Puddle!’
to their child, what they mean is ‘Don’t step into it!’ [41,
