Speech Acts In English

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

Speech acts, those actions carried out mainly by means of language, are used in English in a range of complex ways. However, they have rarely been covered in English as a foreign language (EFL) materials and textbooks. Bringing together current theories from pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, this book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive model of directive speech acts and showing how to teach them to learners of English. It provides a review of the strengths and weaknesses of current theories of illocution and a critical assessment of existing EFL textbooks. Descriptions of the meaning and form of directive speech act constructions are given in the cognitive pedagogical grammar of directive speech acts (included), which offers a wealth of examples to make the information accessible to non-specialist readers. The book also provides a wide range of practical activities, showing how research on illocutionary acts can be implemented in practice.

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e. speech acts such as requests, commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings, compliments and apologies. The third part, finally, contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.

This book presents a new classification of speech acts. It is an alter native to all previously published classifications of speech acts. The classification proposed here is based on an extensive set of data, name lyon all the verbs designating linguistic activities and aspects thereof. A theoretically and methodologically justifiable method is used to proceed in a number of steps from these data to the classification. The classification is documented in a lexicon with two sections. The first section exhibits the classification in all its details. Each verb is listed to its meaning at the appropriate place in the classification. according The second, alphabetically ordered section enables one to locate the verbs classified in the first part. The speech act classification as presented in this book has a number of consequences for linguistic theorizing: the book makes advances in three linguistically relevant fields - speech act theory, lexicology, and theory of meaning. In speech act theory firstly of course a classifica tion is proposed which is theoretically justified and which is simul taneously based explicitly and systematically on linguistic data. Second ly, a wider concept of speech acts is introduced which proves its value by making possible a linguistically justified classification. Thirdly, the concept of speech act sequence (or more generally partial order) is brought into focus as a major organizational principle of the semantic relation between speech acts.

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e. speech acts such as requests, commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings, compliments and apologies. The third part, finally, contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.

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.

Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages.