The Speech Act Theory

Paper Summary:

The paper shows how, in conversation, people cooperate in making utterances, thereby creating social communication in an effort to express meaning. The paper discusses what constitutes a request and reveals that much of the time, a speaker will make an indirect appeal for action, slightly obscuring the request within an indirect sentence. The paper then investigates and compares how indirect directives are expressed in the English and the Mandarin Chinese languages. The paper appends a pronunciation guide for Chinese tones, vowels and consonants.

Outline:
Introduction
Speech Act Theory
Speech Act Categories
Speech Act Categories in Chinese
Direct and Indirect Speech Acts
Grice's Cooperative Principle
Politeness Theory 'Face' and Its Effect in Indirect Directives
Examples of Co-Maintaining Face in Chinese Conversation
Levels of Politeness in Conversation
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"In speaking people do more with words than share information, and when they do share information, an implicit meaning in an utterance is often expressed along with what the words in the utterance explicitly express. In an utterance, there can be three diverse levels of action that may be associated with the utterance. According to Austin, these levels include "the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, and what one does by saying it..." (Bach, K: internet) and are called locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Take, for example, the utterance, "There is a car coming." The locutionary act in that utterance is the act of informing a hearer that there is a car approaching. There is a lack of literal information regarding where exactly the vehicle is and exactly at what time it is due, but the sharing of the information occurs. The illocutionary act is what the utterance does, which in this case involves informing the hearer of a moving vehicle and advises him to look for the car. The perlocutionary act is the effect that the utterance has on the hearer, which in this utterance is that the hearer becomes vigilant and looks for the car. In the utterance itself, there isn't any explicit warning spoken to the hearer, but the implicit warning can be understood."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bach, K. "Speech Acts" Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/spchacts.html [online]accessed on December 15, 2001
• Brown, P. Levinson, S. (1978) Politeness: Some universals in language usageCambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Coultard, M. (1985) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis London: Longman
• Poole, S.C. (1999) An Introduction to Linguistics Beijing: MacMillan Publishers
• Richards, J.C., Platt, J., Platt, H. (eds.) (1992) Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics Harlow: Longman

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