Топик: Косвенные речевые акты в современном английском языке

Some speech acts (“face threatening acts”) intrinsically threaten the faces. Ordersand requests, for instance, threaten the negative face, whereas criticism and disagreementthreaten the positive face. The perpetrator therefore must either avoid such actsaltogether (which may be impossible for a host of reasons, including concern forher/his own face) or find ways of performing them with mitigating of their face threatening effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a son to his father) “A re you using the car tonight? ” counts as a face-respecting strategy because it leaves room for father to refuse by saying “So rry, it ha s already been taken (rather than the face-threatening “Yo u may not use it ” ). In that sense, the speaker’s and the hearer’s faces are being attended to.

Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in its qualitative aspect (what is considered to be polite), but in its quantitative aspect as well (to what degree various language constructions realize the politeness principle). Of course there are absolute markers of politeness, e.g. “please”, but they are not numerous. Most of language units gain a certain degree of politeness in a context.

3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AND “DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?

It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech acts the relationship between the words being uttered and the illocutionary force is often oblique. For example, the sentence “This is a pig sty ” might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand indirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a barnyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning-in particular, the meaning of the word “this” does not determine which area is being referred to.

How do we manage to define the illocution of an utterance if we cannot do that by its syntactic form? There are several theories trying to answer this question.

3.1. The inference theory

The basic steps in the inference of an indirect speech act are as follows [37, 286-340]:

I. The literal meaning and force of the utterance are computed by, and available to, the participants. The key to understanding of the literal meaning is the syntactical form of the utterance.

II. There is some indication that the literal meaning is inadequate (“a trigger” of an indirect speech act).

According to Searle, in indirect speech acts the speaker performs one illocutionary act but intends the hearer to infer another illocution by relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, as well as on general powers of rationality and inference, that is onillocutionary force indicating devices[43, 73]. The illocutionary point of an utterance can be discovered by an inferential process that attends to the speaker's prosody, the context of utterance, the form of the sentence, the tense and mood of verbs, knowledge of the language itself and of conversational conventions, and general encyclopaedic knowledge. The speaker knows this and speaks accordingly, aware that the hearer - as a competent social being and language user - will recognize the implications[32, 41]. So, indirectness relies on conversational implicature: there is overwhelming evidence that speakers expect hearers to draw inferences from everything that is uttered. It follows that the hearer will begin the inferential process immediately on being presented with the locution. Under the cooperative principle, there is a convention that the speaker has some purpose for choosing this very utterance in this particular context instead of maintaining silence or generating another utterance. The hearer tries to guess this purpose, and in doing so, considers the context, beliefs about normal behaviour in this context, beliefs about the speaker, and the presumed common ground.

The fact that divergence between the form and the contents of an utterance can vary within certain limits helps to discover indirect speech acts: an order can be disguised as a request, a piece of advice or a question, but it is much less probable as a compliment.

III. There are principles that allow us to derive the relevant indirect force from the literal meaning and the context.

Searle suggests that these principles can be stated within his theory of felicity conditions forspeech acts [44, 38].

For example, according to Searle’s theory, a commandor a request has the following felicity conditions:

1. Asking or stating the preparatory condition:

Can you pass the salt? The hearer's ability to perform an action is being asked.

Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request.

2. Asking or stating the propositional content:

You're standing on my foot. Would you kindly get off my foot?

Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it is a request.

3. Stating the sincerity condition:

I'd like you to do this for me.

Literally it is a statement; non-literally it is a request.

4. Stating or asking the good/overriding reasons for doing an action:

You had better go now. Hadn't you better go now? Why not go now?

Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it is a request.

5. Asking if a person wants/wishes to performan action:

Would you mind helping me with this? Would you mind if I asked you if you could write me a reference?

Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request (in the last example an explicit directive verb is embedded).

All these indirect acts have several common features:

1. Imperative force is not part of the literal meaning of these sentences.