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Indirect speech acts

Types of sentences

For example:

  • Imperative

(ordering or requesting)

  • Interrogative

(questioning)

  • Declarative

(explicit performatives)

There is a long list of ways of indirectly requesting an addressee to

"shut the door"

  • (I want you to close the door.)

  • (Please shut the door.)

  • (Would you please shut the door?)

Examples.......

John Searle's theory of "indirect speech acts"

'Primary' and 'Secondary' illocutionary acts

Speech Act theory

The square root of a quarter is, obviously, a half.

(performative adverb)

The square root of a quarter is, I believe, a half.

(parenthetical clause)

Pass me the wrench, if you can

(If-clause)

The primary illocutionary act is the indirect one, which is not literally performed.

The secondary illocutionary act is the direct one, performed in the literal utterance of the sentence.

For example:

"We should leave for the show or else we’ll be late."

"I am not ready yet."

Searle has introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act', which in his account is meant to be, more particularly, an indirect 'illocutionary' act.

Illocutionary act: the extra meaning of the utterance produced on the basis of its literal meaning

For example:

  • a request of the hearer to open the window.

Speech act theory proposed by "John.L. Austin" and has been developed by "J. R. Searle".

They believe that language is not only used to inform or to describe things, it is often used to “do things”, to perform acts.

For example:

"You’re fired"

“There is a policeman on the corner”

"Literal force hypothsis"

(LFH)

Indiret speech acts

A major problem for both:

  • Thesis
  • Antitesis

Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests.

For example, a speaker asks,

"Would you like to meet me for coffee?"

and another replies,

"I have class."

As illocutionry force is built into sentence form. Let us call this the "literal force hypothsis".

LFH has two rules :

  • Explicit performatives have the force named by the performative verb in the matrix clause.

  • The three major sentence-types in English, have the forces traditionally associated with them.

Theories

Two basic theories have been proposed to rescue LFH

  • Idiom theory

  • Inference theory

Idioms are by definition non-compositinal, and are therefore likely to be as the arbitrary sound-meaning of lexical items.

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