The Study of Translation in View of New Developments in Discourse Analysis: The Problem of Indirect Speech Acts

Poetics Today ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoshana Blum-Kulka
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts

Speech Acts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Green
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts ◽  
Grammatical Mood ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Made In

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely. Recent theorizing about speech acts tends to fall either into conventionalist or intentionalist traditions: the former sees speech acts as analogous to moves in a game, with such acts being governed by rules of the form “doing A counts as doing B”; the latter eschews game-like rules and instead sees speech acts as governed by communicative intentions only. Debate also arises over the extent to which speakers can perform one speech act indirectly by performing another. Skeptics about the frequency of such events contend that many alleged indirect speech acts should be seen instead as expressions of attitudes. New developments in speech act theory also situate them in larger conversational frameworks, such as inquiries, debates, or deliberations made in the course of planning. In addition, recent scholarship has identified a type of oppression against under-represented groups as occurring through “silencing”: a speaker attempts to use a speech act to protect her autonomy, but the putative act fails due to her unjust milieu.

On questions following questions in service encounters

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Merritt
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
American English ◽  
Service Encounters ◽  
Conversational Analysis ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Answer Pattern ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThis paper is a treatment of some patterns of talk that occur in service encounters (and presumably in other conversations as well). It is an attempt to examine the contribution of discourse structures such as the question–answer adjacency pair to the coherence of everyday discourse. The customer-request–server-response sequence is examined as to its adherence to a pattern of question–answer. Though some sequences do adhere to the question–answer pattern, there are many that do not, but rather are manifested as question–question. The question–question patterns are shown to be of several kinds in terms of the relationship of the second question to the first. The analysis demonstrates the relationship of these patterns to the pragmatic interpretation of the customer-request as either a request for information or as a request for service, and leads to a tentative set of generalizations concerning the interpretation of responses to questions in general. (Questions, conversational analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics, indirect speech acts, coherence, ritual, service encounters, American English.)

Jordanian graduate students’ complaints on Facebook: Semantic formulas and politeness

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Fathi Migdadi ◽  
Muhammad A. Badarneh ◽  
Laila Khwaylih
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Negative Affect ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Student Union ◽  
Closed Group ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts ◽  
Face Saving

Abstract This study examines Jordanian graduate students' complaints posted on a Facebook closed group and directed to the representatives of Student Union at Jordan University of Science and Technology to be transferred to the officials concerned. In line with Boxer (1993b), the study considers the students' complaints to be indirect speech acts, as the addressee(s) are not the source of the offense. Using a sample of 60 institutional complaining posts, the researchers have analysed the complaints in terms of their semantic formulas, politeness functions and correlations with the gender of the complainers. The students’ complaints are classified into six semantic formulas of which the act statement element is indispensable as the complaint is stated in it. The other five formulas, ordered according to their frequency, are opener, remedy, appreciative closing, justification and others. Despite the negative affect typically involved in the complaining act, the semantic formulas identified in this study are found to signal politeness and fit into Brown and Levinson’s (1987) pool of face-saving strategies rather than face-threatening acts. Specifically, when the graduate students direct their Facebook complaints to the students' representatives, they tend to offer camaraderie with them to be encouraged to pursue the problems specified in the complainers’ posts.

Conversational sequences and preference for indirect speech acts

1988 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs ◽  
Rachel A. G. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts ◽  
Conversational Sequences

scholarly journals PRAGMATIC TRANSPOSITIONS OF INTERROGATIVE STATEMENTS IN EVERYDAY COMMUNICATION

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-63
Author(s):  
Т.В. Нестерова
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Theoretical Studies ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts ◽  
Comparative Aspect ◽  
Expression Of Emotions ◽  
Lexical Composition ◽  
Everyday Communication

В статье описаны контекстуально-ситуативные косвенные речевые акты, имеющие форму вопроса, но реализующие другие коммуникативные интенции – сообщение, согласие, побуждение, выражение эмоций. Речь идет о высказываниях с одинаковым синтаксическим строением и лексическим составом (омонимия высказываний разных коммуникативных типов), в которых наиболее ярко проявляются различительные свойства интонации. Механизмом порождения этих речевых актов является прагматическая транспозиция. The article describes contextual-situational indirect speech acts in the form of a question, but realizing other communicative intentions – message, consent, motivation, expression of emotions. We are talking about statements with the same syntactic structure and lexical composition (homonymy of statements of different communicative types), in which the distinctive properties of intonation are most clearly manifested. The mechanism for generating these speech acts is pragmatic transposition. The materials of the article can be used both for further theoretical studies of transposed speech acts (including in a comparative aspect), and for the creation of communicatively oriented textbooks on Russian as a foreign language.

scholarly journals Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali W.Lafi
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech Acts

Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

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