Some speech acts (“face threatening acts”) intrinsically
threaten the faces. Orders and requests, for instance, threaten
the negative face, whereas criticism and disagreement threaten
the positive face. The perpetrator therefore must either avoid
such acts altogether (which may be impossible for a host of
reasons, including concern for her/his own face) or find ways of
performing them with mitigating of their face threatening
effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a son to
his father) “Are you using the car tonight?” counts as a face-
respecting strategy because it leaves room for father to refuse
by saying “Sorry, it has already been taken (rather than the face-
threatening “You may not use it”). In that sense, the speaker’s
and the hearer’s faces are being attended to.
Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in its
qualitative aspect (what is considered to be polite), but in its
quantitative aspect as well (to what degree various language
constructions realize the politeness principle). Of course there
are absolute markers of politeness, e.g. “please”, but they are
not numerous. Most of language units gain a certain degree of
politeness in a context.
3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AND
“DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?
It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech acts
the relationship between the words being uttered and the
illocutionary force is often oblique. For example, the sentence
“This is a pig sty” might be used nonliterally to state that a
certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand
indirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used
literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a
barnyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by
its linguistic meaning - in particular, the meaning of the word
“this” does not determine which area is being referred to.
How do we manage to define the illocution of an utterance
if we cannot do that by its syntactic form? There are several
theories trying to answer this question.
The inference theory
The basic steps in the inference of an indirect speech act
are as follows [37, 286-340]:
I. The literal meaning and force of the utterance are computed
by, and available to, the participants. The key to
understanding of the literal meaning is the syntactical
form of the utterance.
II. There is some indication that the literal meaning is
inadequate (“a trigger” of an indirect speech act).
According to Searle, in indirect speech acts the speaker
performs one illocutionary act but intends the hearer to infer
another illocution by relying on their mutually shared background
information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, as well as on
general powers of rationality and inference, that is on
illocutionary force indicating devices [43, 73]. The
illocutionary point of an utterance can be discovered by an
inferential process that attends to the speaker's prosody, the
context of utterance, the form of the sentence, the tense and
mood of verbs, knowledge of the language itself and of
conversational conventions, and general encyclopaedic knowledge.
The speaker knows this and speaks accordingly, aware that the
hearer - as a competent social being and language user - will
recognize the implications [32, 41]. So, indirectness relies on
conversational implicature: there is overwhelming evidence that
speakers expect hearers to draw inferences from everything that
is uttered. It follows that the hearer will begin the
inferential process immediately on being presented with the
locution. Under the cooperative principle, there is a convention
that the speaker has some purpose for choosing this very
utterance in this particular context instead of maintaining
silence or generating another utterance. The hearer tries to
guess this purpose, and in doing so, considers the context,
beliefs about normal behaviour in this context, beliefs about the
speaker, and the presumed common ground.
The fact that divergence between the form and the contents
of an utterance can vary within certain limits helps to discover
indirect speech acts: an order can be disguised as a request, a
piece of advice or a question, but it is much less probable as a
compliment.
III. There are principles that allow us to derive the
relevant indirect force from the literal meaning and the context.
Searle suggests that these principles can be stated within
his theory of felicity conditions for speech acts [44, 38].
For example, according to Searle’s theory, a command or a
request has the following felicity conditions:
1. Asking or stating the preparatory condition:
Can you pass the salt? The hearer's ability to perform an
action is being asked.
Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request.
2. Asking or stating the propositional content:
You're standing on my foot. Would you kindly get off my
foot?
Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it
is a request.
3. Stating the sincerity condition:
I'd like you to do this for me.
Literally it is a statement; non-literally it is a request.
4. Stating or asking the good/overriding reasons for doing
an action:
You had better go now. Hadn't you better go now? Why not go
now?
5. Asking if a person wants/wishes to perform an action:
Would you mind helping me with this? Would you mind if I
asked you if you could write me a reference?
Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request
(in the last example an explicit directive verb is embedded).
All these indirect acts have several common features:
1. Imperative force is not part of the literal meaning of these
sentences.
2. These sentences are not ambiguous.
3. These sentences are conventionally used to make requests. They
often have "please" at end or preceding the verb.
4. These sentences are not idioms, but are idiomatically
used as requests.
5. These sentences can have literal interpretations.
6. The literal meanings are maintained when they question
the physical ability: Can you pass the salt? - No, it’s too far
from me. I can’t reach it.
7. Both the literal and the non-literal illocutionary acts
are made when making 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.
A problem of the inference theory is that syntactic forms
with a similar meaning often show differences in the ease in
which they trigger indirect speech acts:
a) Can you reach the salt?
b) Are you able to reach the salt?
c) Is it the case that you at present have the ability to
reach the salt?
While (a) is most likely to be used as a request, (b) is
less likely, and (c) is highly unlikely, although they seem to
express the same proposition.
Another drawback of the inference theory is the complexity
of the algorithm it offers for recognizing and deciphering the
true meaning of indirect speech acts. If the hearer had to pass
all the three stages every time he faced an indirect speech act,
identifying the intended meaning would be time-consuming whereas
normally we recognize each other’s communicative intentions
quickly and easily.
3.2. Indirect speech acts as idioms?
Another line of explanation of indirect speech acts was
brought forward by Jerrold Sadock [42, 197]. According to his
theory, indirect speech acts are expressions based on an
idiomatic meaning added to their literal meaning (just like the
expression “to push up daisies” has two meanings: “to increase
the distance of specimens of Bellis perennis from the center of
the earth by employing force” and “to be dead”). Of course, we
do not have specific idioms here, but rather general idiom
schemes. For example, the scheme “Can you + verb?” is idiomatic
for commands and requests.
However, the idiomatic hypothesis is questionable as a
general strategy. One problem is that a reaction to an indirect
speech act can be composite to both the direct and the indirect
speech act, e.g.
The speaker: Can you tell me the time?
The hearer: Yes, it’s three o’clock.
We never find this type of reaction to the literal and the
idiomatic intepretation of an idiom:
The speaker: Is he pushing the daisies by now?
Hearer 1: Yes/no (the idiomatic meaning is 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 seemingly semantically related) forms that behave in a
similar way:
a) Can you pass me the salt?
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/would you mind),
and it seems that it is this semantic relation that makes them
express the same indirect speech act. This is different for
classical idioms, where the phrasing itself matters:
a) to push the daisies “to be dead” vs. to push the roses
b) to kick the bucket “to die” vs. to kick the barrel.
Hence, a defender of the idiom hypothesis must assume a
multitude of idiom schemes, some of which are obviously closely
semantically related.
Summarizing, we can say that there are certain cases of
indirect speech acts that have to be seen as idiomatized
syntactic constructions (for example, English why not-questions.)
But typically, instances of indirect speech acts should not be
analyzed as simple idioms.
3. Other approaches to the problem
The difference of the idiomatic and inference approaches
can be explained by different understanding of the role of
convention in communication. The former theory overestimates it
while the latter underestimates it, and both reject the
qualitative diversity of conventionality. Correcting this
shortcoming, Jerry Morgan writes about two types of convention in
indirect speech 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 an indirect request is undoubtedly
conventional, i.e. habitual for everyday speech that is always
characterized by a certain degree of ritualization.
In accordance with this approach the function of an
indirect speech act is conventionally fixed, and an inference
process is not needed. Conventions of usage express what
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.
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