Топик: Косвенные речевые акты в современном английском языке
a)to push the daisies “to be dead” vs. topush the roses
b)to kick the bucket “to die” vs. to kick the barrel .
Hence, a defender of the idiom hypothesis must assume a multitude of idiom schemes, some of which areobviously closely semantically related.
Summarizing, we can say that there are certain cases of indirect speech acts that have to be seen as idiomatized syntactic constructions (for example, English why not -questions.) But typically, instances of indirectspeech acts should not be analyzed as simple idioms.
3.3. Other approaches to the problem
The difference of the idiomatic and inference approaches can be explained by different understanding of the role of convention in communication. The former theory overestimates it while the latterunderestimates it, and both reject the qualitative diversity of conventionality. Correcting this shortcoming, Jerry Morgan writes about two types of convention in indirect speech acts [39, 261]:conventions of language and conventions of usage. The utterance “Can you pass the salt? ” cannot be considered as a regular idiom (conventions of language), but its use for an indirect request is undoubtedly conventional, i.e. habitual for everyday speech that is always characterized by a certain degree of ritualization.
In accordance with this approach the function of an indirect speech act is conventionally fixed, and an inference process is not needed. Conventions of usageexpress what Morgan calls “short-circuited implicatures”: implicatures that once were motivated by explicitreasoning but which now donot have to be calculated explicitly anymore.
There is an opinion that indirect speech acts must be considered as language polysemy, e.g. “Why not + verb?” construction serves as a formal marker of not just the illocutive function of a question, but of that of a request,e.g. “Why not clean the room right now?”
According to Grice and Searle, the implicit meaning of an utterance can always be inferred from its literal meaning. But according to the relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson [46, 113], the process of interpretation of indirect speech acts does not at all differ from the process of interpretation of direct speech acts. Furthermore, it is literal utterances that are often marked and sound less natural than utterances with an indirect meaning. For example, the utterance “She is a snake .” having an implicit meaning sounds more natural than “She is spiteful .”Exclamatory utterances “It’s not exactly a picniс weather! ” and“ It’s not a day for cricket !” soundmore expressive and habitual than the literalutterance “What nasty weather we are having!” The interrogative construction expressing a request “Could you put on your black dress? ” is more customary than the performative: “I suggest that you should put on your black dress.”
To summarize: there is no unanimity among linguists studying indirect speech acts as to how we discover them in each other’s speech and “extract” their meaning. Every theory has got its strong and weak points, and the final word has not yet been said.
4. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN
A DISCOURSE
Speech act theories considered above treat an indirect speech act as the product of a single utterance based on a single sentence with only one illocutionary point - thus becoming a pragmatic extension to sentence grammars. In real life, however, we do not use isolated utterances: an utterance functions as part of a larger intention or plan. In most interactions, the interlocutors each have an agenda; and to carry out the plan, the illocutions within a discourse are ordered with respect to one another. Very little work has been done on the contribution of the illocutions within utterances to the development of understanding of a discourse.
As Labov and Fanshel pointed out, “most utterances can be seen as performing several speech acts simultaneously ... Conversation is not a chain of utterances, but rather a matrix of utterances and actions bound together by a web of understandings and reactions ... In conversation, participants use language to interpret to each other the significance of the actual and potential events that surround them and to draw the consequences for their past and future actions.”(Labov, Fanshel 1977: 129).
Attempts to break out of the sentence-grammar mould were made by Labov and Fanshel [35], Edmondson [29], Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper [24]. Even an ordinary and rather formal dialogue between a customer and a chemist contains indirectness (see table 4.1).
Table 4.1
Indirect speech acts of an ordinary formal dialogue
| Participant | Utterance | Indirect speech acts |
| Customer |
Do you have any Actifed? |
Seeks to establish preparatory condition for transaction and thereby implies the intention to buy on condition that Actifed is available. |
| Chemist | Tablets or linctus? |
Establishes a preparatory condition for the transaction by offering a choice of product. |
| Customer |
Packet of tablets, please. |
Requests one of products offered, initiates transaction. In this context, even without “please”, the noun phrase alone will function as a requestive. |
| Chemist | That'll be $18.50. |
A statement disguising a request for payment to execute the transaction. |
| Customer | OK. |
К-во Просмотров: 350
Бесплатно скачать Топик: Косвенные речевые акты в современном английском языке
|