Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Primary vs. explicit performatives Performative Hypothesis Sentence type and illocutionary force Conventional speech acts politeness
Counterevidence to PH
Performative utterances need not be in the active voice, nor have a first person subject pronoun; eg. Passengers are hereby warned not Primary performatives and their corresponding explicit ones do not have the same meaning; eg. I state to you that earth is flat vs. earth is flat
Idiom theory
One way to deal with conventional indirect speech acts is to consider them idioms in the sense that they are learnt and stored in memory as conventional forms Idioms are not compositional: their meaning is not calculated from the meaning of their constituents They do not have a literal and a non-literal meaning
Inference theory
Another way is to concede that conventional indirect speech acts have a literal meaning and that their illocutionary force is computed on the basis of it In Searles terms, they have a primary and a secondary illocutionary force In order to account for the discrepancy between the primary and the secondary illocutionary acts, the following are needed:
(i) Certain general principles of cooperative conversation, (ii) Mutually shared background information between S and H (iii)An ability on the part of H to make inferences.
Generalization
Indirect speech acts can be made by: (i) Asking whether or stating that a preparatory condition obtains, (ii) Asking whether or stating that a propositional condition obtains, (iii) Stating that the sincerity condition obtains, etc. The problem is why should speakers speak indirectly?
Politeness
Leech (1983) postulates a Politeness Principle to account for indirectness The PP has maxims among which are: Tact Maxim (a- minimize cost to other / b- maximize cost to other) Generosity Maxim (a- minimize benefit to self /b- maximize cost to self) Modesty Maxim (a- minimize praise of self /b- maximize dispraise of self)