“You are two scoundrels, of that I am sure” as a question “And
where is the Savior?”
Anecdotes often play with a wrong understanding of the
speaker’s illocutionary point by the hearer, for example:
Someone knocks at the window of a peasant’s house at 3
a.m.:
- Hey, you need any firewood?
- No, go away, I am sleeping.
In the morning, the peasant saw that all the firewood
disappeared from his shed.
In this funny story the peasant took the question for an
offer, and his interlocutor (hardly by mistake) took the refusal
as the answer.
7. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AS A YARDSTICK OF COMMUNICATIVE
MATURITY AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING
“Нам
не дано предугадать, как слово
наше отзовется”.
Ф.Тютчев
Understanding of indirect speech acts is not a man’s
inborn ability. Younger children whose communicational skills are
not yet well developed perceive only one illocutionary force of a
speech act, the one deducible from the syntactic form of an
utterance. For instance, once my four-year-old son was carrying
home a paintbrush I just bought for him. On our way home he often
dropped it. I said: “You let your brush fall a hundred times!”
meaning a directive: “Be more careful!” The boy, however, took my
words literally and replied: “Of course not, mom. I dropped it
only six times!”
Here is another example of communicational immaturity. A
boy of seven phones to his mother’s office:
- I’d like to speak to Mrs. Jones, please.
- She is out. Please call back in a few minutes.
- OK.
The boy reacted to the utterance “Please call back in a few
minutes” as to a request while the communicative situation
required answering “Thank you” (for advice) instead of “OK”.
If the hearer does not recognize the speaker’s
communicative intentions, a communicative failure will follow.
For example, asking, “Where is the department store?” one may
hear: “The department store is closed” in a situation when one
needs the department store as an orienting point.
Quite often a question is understood as a reproach, e.g.
- Why didn’t you invite him?
- Invite him yourself if you want to.
- I do not want to invite him. I am just asking.
Surprise can be taken for distrust:
- Does it really cost that much?
- Don’t you believe me?
Sociolinguistic research shows that everywhere in the
civilized world women tend to use more indirect speech acts than
men. Educated people, regardless of their sex, prefer indirect
speech acts to direct ones. Correct understanding of indirect
speech acts by an adult is an index of his or her sanity [9,90].
On balance, the question How to do things with words?
cannot be answered easily and unambiguously: just build your
utterance in accordance with certain rules or use one of the
“moulds”, and you will avoid a communication failure.
A chasm of incomplete understanding always separates
communicants, even most intimate ones, and indirect speech acts
often make it deeper. Yet, only words can bridge the chasm
conducting the thought from one shore to the other. Every time
the bridge is to be built from scratch, and choosing linguistic
means, the interactants must take into account the distance, the
“weather” conditions, the previous mistakes, both their own and
other people’s, and “the weight” of the thought to be conveyed.
Finally, the thought is worded and set off, but we can only guess
what awaits it on the other shore. We are helpless there, and our
thought is now in the hearer’s power.
CONCLUSIONS
Correspondence between the syntactic form of an utterance
and its pragmatic function is not always 1:1. The same syntactic
form can express various communicative intentions. On the other
hand, to express a communicative intention we can use a variety
of linguistic means. Therefore, in speech there are many
constructions used to express not the meaning fixed by the system
of language, but a secondary meaning that is conventional or
appears in a particular context. Speech acts made up by means of
such constructions are indirect. In indirect speech acts, the
speaker conveys the non-literal as well as the literal meaning,
and an apparently simple utterance may, in its implications,
count for much more. Hence, it is very important to study not
only the structure of a grammatical or lexical unit and its
meaning in the system of language, but also the pragmatic context
shaping its functioning in communication.
A number of theories try to explain why we generate
indirect speech acts and how we discover them in each other’s
speech. The inference theory brought forward by John Searle
claims that we first perceive the literal meaning of the
utterance and find some indication that the literal meaning is
inadequate. Having done that, we derive the relevant indirect
force from the literal meaning and context.
Another line of explanation developed by Jerrold Sadock is
that indirect speech acts are expressions based on an idiomatic
meaning added to their literal meaning.
Jerry Morgan writes about two types of convention in
indirect speech acts: conventions of language and conventions of
usage. 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.
According to the relevance theory developed by Sperber and
Wilson, the process of interpretation of direct speech acts does
not at all differ from the process of interpretation of indirect
speech acts. Furthermore, it is literal utterances that are often
marked and sound less natural than utterances with indirect
meaning.
Speech act theories have treated illocutionary acts as the
products of single utterances based on single sentences with only
one illocutionary point - thus becoming a pragmatic extension to
sentence grammars. The contribution of the illocutions of
individual utterances to the understanding of topics and episodes
is not yet well documented.
Pragmatic research reveals that the main types of indirect
speech acts are found in all natural languages. Yet, some
indirect speech acts are specific for a group of languages or
even for a particular language. Conventional indirect speech acts
must always be taken into account when learning a foreign
language. They often make the communicative center of utterances
and sound much more natural than direct speech acts.
Indirect speech acts are widely used in everyday speech, in
fiction, and in publicistic works because they influence the
quality of argumentation and amplify the impact upon the hearer’s
emotions. Indirect speech acts are the driving force of
advertisements whose illocutionary point is always a directive:
"Buy it now!"
It has been found that indirect expressives, directives
and representatives compose the most numerous group of indirect
speech acts in modern English discourse.
The use of indirect speech acts in discourse has been
studied by a number of linguists, cognitive scientists, and
philosophers, including Searle [18], [19], [43], [44], [45];
Grice [4], [30]; Ballmer [23]; Kreckel [34]; Clark [27];
Partridge [40], Cohen [28], Pocheptsov [13], Romanov [16].
Yet, the research of indirect speech acts is still far from being
complete.
РЕЗЮМЕ
Робота присвячена непрямим мовленнєвим актам у сучасному
англійському дискурсі. Непрямі мовленнєві акти – це мовленнєві дії, що
здійснюються за допомогою висловлювань, які мають дві іллокутивні сили,
тобто мовець має на увазі одночасно і пряме значення висловлювання, і
щось більше. Типові приклади непрямих мовленнєвих актів – це ввічливі
прохання у вигляді запитань або твердження у вигляді запитань (риторичні
питання). Непрямі мовленнєві акти привутні в усіх мовах, проте в кожній
мові вони мають свої особливості.
Розділи 1 - 4 є теоретичними. У них розкривається сутність
непрямих мовленнєвих актів, розглядаються причини їхньої широкої
поширеності в мовленні на прикладі англійського дискурса,
аналізуються існуючі теорії, що пояснюють механізм розуміння
співрозмовниками непрямих мовленнєвих актів, з'ясовується внесок
іллокутивної сили окремих висловлювань у процес розуміння усього
дискурса.
Розділи 5 - 7 мають практичний характер. У них порівнюються
конвенціональні непрямі мовленнєві акти англійської й
української мов, що використовуються в типових ситуаціях
спілкування; наводяться приклади непрямих мовленнєвих актів в
творах сучасних британських і американських авторів, газетах,
рекламних роликах; доводиться, що розуміння людиною непрямих
мовленнєвих актів є мірилом його комунікативної зрілості.
Особливо підкреслюється, що оскільки непрямі мовленнєві акти
грають істотну роль у мовному впливі на співрозмовника, в етиці,
у повсякденному спілкуванні і носять конкретномовний характер, їх
необхідно враховувати при вивченні іноземних мов.
Ключові слова: непрямий мовленнєвий акт, теорія
мовленнєвих актів, текст, дискурс, локуція, іллокуція,
перлокуція, комунікативний намір, принцип кооперації, принцип
увічливості, іллокутивна сила, мовленнєва поведінка,
комунікація, прагматика, контекст.
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