Speech acts in (inter)action: Repeated questions

Abstract

Social actions performed through language are the focal object of research on speech act realization (speech act research,1 for short) and conversation analysis, among other approaches to discourse that I will not consider here. Yet because of their di¤erent disciplinary origins and histories, the two approaches are interested in di¤erent aspects of social action mediated through language and, specifically, through talk. Speech act research is primarily concerned with the semantic structures (‘‘conventions of means’’) and linguistic resources (‘‘conventions of form’’)2 by which speech acts are implemented (pragmalinguistics, ‘‘the linguistic interface of pragmatics’’) and the social conditions for carrying out speech acts appropriately and e¤ectively (sociopragmatics, ‘‘the sociological interface of pragmatics’’). Conversation analysis is fundamentally concerned with the sequential organization of action in talk-in-interaction. These di¤erences3 in analytical focus make di¤erent demands on data. Speech act researchers draw on a large range of data types, including natural, elicited, interactional, non-interactional, and various forms of self-report data. As the main interest is in the conventions of means and form by which the focal speech act is implemented, non-interactional (e.g., written questionnaire) data specifically eliciting that speech act are considered an appropriate source. And even when the data are interactional, it is standard analytical practice to isolate the focal speech act from its interactional environment, submit its linguistic design to scrutiny, and relate the identified meaning and form conventions to discourse-external context factors. This approach has been particularly common in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research on speech act realization. It has yielded a wealth of knowledge about speech act strategies and their implementation in di¤erent languages, the relationship of indirectness and politeness, resources for mitigating and upgrading illocutionary force, and about