Indirect Speech Acts

Explores the fascinating phenomenon of indirect speech acts, highlighting the situations they are used in, and how they are understood.

A direct successor to Searle's Speech Acts (C.U.P. 1969), Expression and Meaning refines earlier analyses and extends speech-act theory to new areas including indirect and figurative discourse, metaphor and fiction.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Braunschweig, course: Approaches to Meaning, language: English, abstract: This term paper will deal with speech act theory, especially with the success of speech acts depending on certain conditions. Due to the usage of direct and indirect speech acts in everyday conversations it will be analysed which conditions have to be fulfilled to have a successful speech act. The following theories will be used to answer the research question whether the same conditions have to be fulfilled for direct and indirect speech acts to be successful: 1) Theory of Felicity Conditions by John Searle 2) Cooperative Principle by Paul Herbert Grice 3) Inference Theory by Gordon and Lakoff The hypothesis is that indirect speech acts are different than direct speech acts due to the demanded hearer uptake and the possible ambiguity. After giving definitions of important linguistic terms and theories, the success of utterances and conversations in general will be described by the help of the Cooperative Principle by Grice. Then different examples of Direct and Indirect Speech Acts will be analysed that will show the difference between the two forms. Some of the used examples are made up and some are dialogues taken from the TV-series “The Big Bang Theory” as well as “The Walking Dead”. To explain how one can interpret the implicature in an utterance, the inference theory by Gordon and Lakoff will be taken into account. In the end it is made clear that the success of Indirect Speech Acts depends on the context in which the utterance is made and also on other external conditions which the speaker cannot control himself as the speaker often requests a hearer uptake. Different texts by Austin, Thomas, Levinson, Renkema, Cruse and Yule will be studied to get an answer to the research question. Special focus will be put on the Indirect Speech Acts as they can be ambiguous and ask for a hearer uptake to be successful.

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.

Foundations of Speech Act Theory investigates the importance of speech act theory to the problem of meaning in linguistics and philosophy. The papers in this volume, written by respected philosophers and linguists, significantly advance standards of debate in this area. Beginning with a detailed introduction to the individual contributors, this collection demonstrates the relevance of speech acts to semantic theory. It includes essays unified by the assumption that current pragmatic theories are not well equipped to analyse speech acts satisfactorily, and concludes with five studies which assess the relevance of speech act theory to the understanding of philosophical problems outside the area of philosophy of language.

This book merges theory and practical activities to show how research on speech acts can be implemented in EFL teaching.

Both linguists and philosophers have, for a number of years, been interested in the concept of speech acts, first proposed by J. L. Austin; but each discipline has remained uniformed on the often parallel work of the other. This volume brings together linguistic and philosophical approaches to speech acts, in order to bring out agreements and disagreements. Many of the articles focus on the problem of indirect speech acts, or "conversational implicature".Such indirect speech acts are a major impediment to a coherent, explanatory account of the relation between sound and meaning, since it is not clear whether the use of a sentence to perform and indirect speech act is part of the sentence's linguistically significant meaning, to be handled by syntactic rules, or whether this use is best explained on some other basis, such as a theory of language use. In this volume, such philosophers as John Searle and H. P. Grice examine the relation between the content of a sentence and the conditions under which it can be used to perform a given speech act, while such linguists as John Robert Ross, Georgia M. Green, and Jerrold M. Sadock show that the illocutionary intent of a speaker is often reflected in the syntactic properties of the sentence he uses. This book, with its full airing of the controversy regarding the status of conversational implicature and syntactic rules, will be invaluable to both linguists and philosophers concerned with semantics and pragmatics.