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.
