Referring to Speech Acts in Communication: Exploring Meta-Illocutionary Expressions in ICE-Ireland

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study of meta-illocutionary expressions, i.e. of everyday vocabulary such as request, promise and insult, used to explicitly refer to speech acts and to label, discuss and negotiate them in communication. Taking the example of expressions referring to acts of apologising in Irish English, the question is addressed in which contexts, forms and functions these meta-illocutionary expressions are used. Evidence from ICE-Ireland and SPICE-Ireland is employed to demonstrate how this question can be answered empirically, thus providing a model for a corpus-based analysis of such metapragmatic folk terms and how they are used in spoken and written discourse, across genres and illocutionary types. This paper thus offers a blueprint for investigating the meta-illocutionary lexicon of ordinary language users and their first-order conceptualizations of communicative action.