Patterns in purported speech acts

Abstract

In this article I examine utterances which are intended by a foreign speaker to be speech acts, but which are unsuccessful. The failure of these purported speech acts is attributable to the speaker's non-native competence in both the linguistic structure of the second language, and the rules which are to be applied to the structure in order to produce the speech act pattern appropriate for conveying the intended speech act. By describing and categorizing the mistakes which are made, I identify the following areas of possible failure in the purported speech act pattern: focus, semantic redundance, prosody and listener expectation. It is thus important to have adequate formulation in these areas if the speech act is to succeed; and they are part of the speech act pattern, which has as its main components the listener, speaker, language, context and the listener and speaker's experience of the world relevant to the context. The system of rules for speech act patterning determine how the linguistic structure is to be used to produce and interpret an utterance which is to convey a speech act in a specific context.