Illocutionary Force Research Articles

Discourse markers in L2 learners' responses to teacher‐generated compliments during classroom interaction

AbstractThis study explores discourse markers (DMs) as they occur with compliment responses (CRs) in classroom interactions among Iranian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Using the tenets of conversation analysis, this paper draws on data from teacher–student interactions in several private language institutes in Iran. After audiorecording and transcription of the compliment–response exchanges, 148 DMs were identified within the responses. These sequences were analyzed to find out how DMs are combined with four distinct CR types; accept, mitigate, reject, and request interpretation. DMs were also identified and categorizedbased on their frequency of occurance and semantic features to allow comparison with previous findings. The results of this study revealed that Iranian EFL learners resorted to a limited number of DMs in responses to teacher‐generated compliments, with “linking” DMs being the most favorable type. Moreover, some DMs were accompanied by a specific CR type which helped the formation of an intended illocutionary force by the complimentee. It was also observed that a DM or a combination of these markers can stand alone as a legitimate and functional response to compliments, which further reveals that DMs can contribute to both semantic and pragmatic meaning. These findings clearly suggest that explicit teaching of DMs in English language classes should be taken into consideration, as these linguistic elements can provide learners with important tools to convey their intended meaning more smoothly and effectively.

Commitment Phrase: Linking Proposition to Illocutionary Force

This article provides empirical support for the projection of a Commitment Phrase (CommitP) in the field that maps the conversational pragmatics at the periphery of clauses. Krifka (2015, 2019, 2020) proposes CommitP as a projection that maps the speaker’s commitment to act on the proposition insofar as the speaker has evidence for the truth condition or expects the addressee to produce and commit to such evidence. CommitP replaces Ross’s (1970) idea that the speaker/addressee is related to the proposition by a speech-act predicate such as declare. Krifka argues for the alternative approach primarily on theoretical grounds. This article verifies and validates this proposal on the basis of Japanese sentence-final particles and Romanian speechact particles. We extend our analysis beyond these languages that overtly mark CommitP to English, which does not, by proposing an analysis of so-called biased questions that incorporates CommitP.

DirKorp

In this paper, we present recent developments on a new version (v3.0) of DirKorp (Korpus direktivnih govornih činova hrvatskoga jezika), the first Croatian corpus of directive speech acts developed for the purposes of pragmatic research. The corpus contains 800 elicited speech acts collected via an online questionnaire with role-playing tasks, a method of simulated communication that is implemented under pre-set conditions. This method is suitable for researching speech acts due to the ability to collect a great number of examples of such acts of equal propositional content and illocutionary purpose used in the same controlled situations. The presented situations are classified into two categories with regard to the relationship between the participants of the communication act: (1) situations involving interlocutors who are not in a familiar relationship; (2) situations involving interlocutors in a familiar relationship. Assignments of the two categories are organized into four pairs, asking respondents to share a speech act of similar propositional content. The respondents were 100 Croatian speakers, all undergraduate (63%) or graduate students (37%) of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb). The corpus has been manually annotated on the speech act level, each speech act containing up to 14 features: (1) respondent ID, (2) familiarity/unfamiliarity, (3) utterance type, (4) directive performative verb in 1st person, (5) illocutionary force, (6) propositional content, (7) T/V form, (8) exhortative, (9) lexical marker of request, (10) lexical marker of apology, (11) lexical marker of gratitude, (12) honorific title, (13) grammatical mood, and (14) modal verb in 2nd person. It contains 12,676 tokens and 1,692 types. The corpus is encoded according to the TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, developed and maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). DirKorp is available for download under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license from GitHub in TEI format. We describe applied pragmatic annotation as well as the structure of the corpus.

Clarifying illocutionary force

ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is on the practice of clarifying illocutionary force, the social activity of asking for and providing descriptions that make explicit what kind of act what done in speaking. Two forms of this practice are distinguished, one that takes place as part of the speech encounter that is the target of the practice, and one that takes place subsequent to that speech encounter. It is argued that the function of the practice differs between these forms, and that this yields two very different ways of responding to a clarificatory query. The paper concludes by considering some implications of this difference in function for understanding of the character of illocutionary force itself, with a focus on its repercussions for understanding the possible role of the stance of participant, as opposed to theorist, in determining what was done in speaking.

Analysis of Congratulation Strategies by Swahili Speakers in Response to Happy Occasions on Facebook Status Updates

This study investigated congratulatory comments posted on Facebook pages in response to H.E Samia Suluhu Hassan’s historic inauguration as the first female president of the United Republic of Tanzania, to determine strategies used by Kiswahili Facebook users to express their congratulations. Case study design was applied in this study. Data was collected through documentary review, where a sum of 200 congratulatory responses were extracted from selected Facebook accounts. The data were then coded based on Elwood’s (2004) congratulatory framework to obtain frequency and percentage of each strategy. The results showed five strategies for expressing congratulations, arranged from the most frequent to the least frequent: Illocutionary force indicating devices, religious expressions, offers of good wishes, speakers’ expression of their faith to the addressee and expressing encouragement. It is recommended that speakers should be familiar with how to express their congratulations to others based on the addressee’s cultural context as utterances used to express congratulations may differ from one culture to another. Failure to congratulate other people when they have delightful occasion is interpreted as being jealous and uncooperative.

A corpus-assisted analysis of indexical signs for (im)politeness in Japanese apology-like behaviour

Abstract This study provides a corpus-assisted pragmatic investigation of three Japanese expressions: the adverb chotto ‘a little’, the verb-ending form -te shimau, conveying (formulaic) regret, and the conditional clause with -tara. These are deictic forms I refer to as indexical signs for (im)politeness because they can, under certain circumstances, trigger evaluations in terms of (im)politeness, potentially favouring an indirect interpretation of the utterance. They are investigated in co-occurrence with apology-like behaviour based on the assumption that, in this context, interactants are more likely to exploit linguistic strategies for conveying additional layers of pragmatic meaning. The main findings point to a wide range of possible interactional meanings the selected forms can acquire in naturally occurring data, from affecting the illocutionary force of the utterance, to conventionally matching interactants’ expectations, to conveying a potentially face-threatening act. These results support the assumption that seemingly polite speech acts will not necessarily be doing polite work (or not only) and highlight the relevance of the interactional context for retrieving communicative meanings.

Resonance and recombinant creativity: Why they are important for research in Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics

AbstractThe present paper discusses the key role of creativity as a form of engagement and categorisation in interaction. One important way to display engagement ‘at talk’ is via resonance, that is when speakers re-use linguistic features that they heard from one another. Speakers constantly imitate and creatively recombine the utterances and the behaviors of their interlocutors. Recombinant creativity is a key cognitive mechanism subserving this, as it involves speakers’ re-elaboration of utterances and illocutionary forces of others, but also, more generally, the creative intervention on observed patterns of behaviour in context. Recombinant creativity is crucial for primarily two pragmatic and conceptual mechanisms: relevance acknowledgement and schematic categorization. A persistent tendency towards the proactive reformulation of an interlocutor’s speech is a textual indicator of relevance acknowledgement. This is because what is said by the other speaker is overtly treated as useful information for the continuation of the interaction. The opposite trend – to be measured on a large scale – is an indicator of lack of engagement. Recombinant creativity varies intra- and inter-culturally and is decisive for speakers’ enactment of socio-pragmatic schemas and the generalisation of form and meaning as a process of shared categorization.

Re: the rhetic

We claim that a notion of rhetic acts can fulfil a useful function in speech act theory. Austin’s examples of rhetic acts are saying that something is so and so, telling someone to do something, and asking whether something is so or so. Though this certainly sounds as if he is talking about the illocutionary acts of asserting, giving directions, and asking questions, we explain why the acts Austin mentions are not illocutionary after all. In short, illocutionary acts are acts that commit the participants in a conversation to various things. The illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by what it commits the interlocutors to. Our suggestion is that what looks like illocutionary force in the cases mentioned by Austin is really the contributions grammatical moods make to the literal meaning of utterances. We argue that this contribution is not part of what characterizes illocutionary acts as such. The semantic contribution of mood already characterizes those speech acts that Austin uses to exemplify rhetic acts. These rhetic acts are not committing in the way that illocutionary acts essentially are. So there must be a sense in which such rhetic acts are not illocutionary ones. In the final section, we suggest that the varieties of rhetic acts indicated by Austin fit neatly into a standard linguistic theoretical framework of conversational scoreboards.

APOLOGY STRATEGY IN DISNEY AND PIXAR’S LUCA MOVIE: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH

This paper aims to analyse the various apology strategies used by the characters in the Luca movie script and describe their use through a pragmatic approach by referring to the theory of Klimczak and Pawlak (2014) and Fraser's theory (1981) to explain the factors that influenced the use of apology strategies by characters in Luca's film script. This study uses a descriptive qualitative research method with data obtained from the film script Luca. The results of this study indicate that there are 23 utterances featuring apologies made by 6 characters in Luca's story. The findings are grouped into a taxonomy of apology strategies, there are 9 types of apology strategies used by the characters in Luca's story. The 9 types of strategy include Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (an expression of regret) of 5 utterances, Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (a request for the forgiveness) of 1 utterance, Phatic Communication of 2 utterances, Acknowledgement of Responsibility (explicit self-blame) of 2 utterances, Internal Intensifiers (intensifying adverbials) with 2 utterances, Acknowledgement of Responsibility with 4 utterances of lack of intent, Acknowledgement of Responsibility (expression of embarrassment) with 4 utterances, Explanation or account of the situation with 2 utterances, and Acknowledgement of Responsibility (refusal to acknowledge guilt) with 1 utterance, which every utterance and strategy were influenced by 1-2 factors.

A Pragmatic Analysis of the Speech Act of Supplication in the Holy Quran

The current study aims at exploring the speech act of supplication in the Glorious Quran namely, the supplicants, the syntactic forms used in the Quran for supplication and its illocutionary force based on Searle's Speech Act Theory. To attain the main purpose of the current study, different syntactic forms of Quranic supplication are investigated based on the categories of the supplicants. The analysis is built upon the relationship between the addresser and the addressee, the situational context, and the lexical choices employed for supplication. Besides, the felicity conditions and the direction of fit are highlighted for explanatory purposes. Findings showed that the Quranic supplications are employed by angels, prophets, believers, unbelievers, Satan, Adam and Eve. Further, supplication is classified as a directive speech act based on Searle's taxonomy. However, the syntactic structures of imperatives, negative-imperatives, interrogatives, conditionals, and declaratives are used for the locutionary act of supplication. Thus, supplication can be classified as both direct directive and indirect directive.

Demystifying Powers and Ideologies via Illocutions in Pope Francis’ Pandemic Homilies: A Discourse Analysis

The Roman Catholic Church, just like other churches in the world, has seen an unprecedented influx of afflicted followers as fear of death looms around the globe with the spread of an unseeable enemy the Covid-19 pandemic. This study analyzed how the Church's supreme pontiff, Pope Francis, mirrors his intentions in his ten randomly selected homilies to project his powers and ideologies amid the pandemic. Grounded on the supposition of discourse that language reflects and shapes social order and individuals interact and react to the words of others to better themselves and the world, this study revealed that Pope Francis' intentions in delivering the pandemic homilies encompass asserting the theological teachings of the Church, directing the congregation to act, committing himself and his audience to respond as a community, and expressing a mixture of personal emotions, which were revealed through the scrutiny of illocutionary forces used to assert legitimate, expert, and referent powers and profess magisterial, covenantal, volitional, and revelational ideologies. Notably, it could be observed in the findings that there appears to be a unification of powers to mirror the overriding ideologies that emerge. Indeed, the findings imply that the pope's homilies serve multiple purposes, including asserting theological teachings, directing the congregation to act, fostering community response, and expressing personal emotions through illocutionary forces establishing a meaningful correspondence between preaching and communication.

Culture and identity in critical remarks

Abstract Awareness of cultural specificity in current classroom discourse is particularly important in an educational setting that has become largely multicultural due to globalization, migration and academic mobility. Drawing on the intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics, and cultural studies, this paper explores the speech act of critical remark in Russian and Israeli classroom settings, focusing on students’ view of its degree of conventionality and admissibility. Data were obtained from a student survey questionnaire (undertaken between 2017-2019). Highlighting similarities and differences, we argue that both Russian and Israeli classroom settings exhibit critical remark as not uncommon, though varying in acceptability. Findings show that critical acts need not be limited to the merely conflictual, but may even be perceived positively, and may moreover exert varying levels of illocutionary force and be interpreted differently by different cultural groups.

Speech acts and the communicative functions of emojis in LIHKG online discussion forum amid COVID-19.

Since the beginning of 2022, the Hong Kong government has imposed strict social distancing measures and changed its stance on various regional policies with the aim to contain the so-called 'fifth wave' of COVID-19. In these pandemic and 'infodemic' times filled with uncertainty and fear, Hong Kong netizens used local online discussion forums as a resource to establish an innovative form of 'helping network.' This study is based on 230 posts from a popular local online discussion forum 'LIHKG' in February 2022 when the pandemic was regarded as most critical by the Department of Health. Speech Acts theoretic approach was adopted to explore how forum users employed speech acts to perform various communicative practices such as expressing concerns, asking for information, and engaging with others in a CMC environment amid a global health crisis. Representatives were found to be the most dominant text-based speech acts, followed by directives, expressives and commissives. Speech acts provide forum users a context in which emoji usage occurs. Forum users not only make use of words to 'do' things in the online self-help forum, but they also employ emojis to either supplement or complement speech acts. This study also shows that emojis perform multiple functions in the discussion posts and argues that they do not merely function as emotion indicators of their textual company, but also carry significant pragmatic meanings by illustrating how they can also carry illocutionary force and in some cases, even alter the illocutionary force of their preceding texts. The findings of this study enhance our understanding of how forum users communicate via verbal and nonverbal means within the underexplored 'helping domain' of online discussion forums. It also suggests that online discussion forum interactions need to be approached differently than other better understood alternatives.

“”? Texting Scenes: Digital Schreibzeug & Emoji Activism

Emoji characters have become indispensable elements of our communication practice. Generally used to express moods or gestures, to clarify or obscure meaning, and to boost a message’s illocutionary force, emoji have expanded our communicative options considerably. And while they have also doubtlessly aided in facilitating international and cross-cultural communication, emoji’s declared goal, to enable “universal” communication, raises questions about this “universalism’s” shapes, forms, and colors. Emoji, this article argues, require us to attend to the texting scene they imply. Their specific history and materiality point to the mechanisms of exclusion emoji, however involuntarily, perpetuate. The article illustrates this in two steps. After a brief discussion of emoji’s history and precursors, including punctuation marks (Satzzeichen) and typographical gestalts such as emoticons, the article considers the influence of political protest on the evolution of our communicative and technological means, including emoji’s repertoire. A close look at the interplay of political activism and its “Schreibzeug” sheds light on the co-constitutive nature of (political) visions and their (esthetic) visualizations.

A Pragmatic Approach to Translating Speech Acts in Religious Discourse

The present study investigates the relationship between pragmatics, as the study of the intended meaning of the speaker, and translation, as the process of transferring texts from a source language to a target language. It shows how pragmatic meaning is outstanding in the process of translation, particularly the translation of speech acts in Arabic religious texts. It is an attempt to highlight the role of pragmatics in translating speech acts and to show how syntax and semantics are not enough to preserve the real intended meaning. Moreover, it demonstrates that translating religious texts is not only a matter of following the common linguistic categories of morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics, but it is also a matter of pragmatic meaning where the intended meaning in a particular context is an essential factor that preserves real meaning. Thus, the aim is to address an important level of translation, namely the pragmatic level. In accordance with this aim, it is hypothesized that translating Arabic religious texts involves problems at the pragmatic level where there are hurdles that should be overcome in the area of speech acts. These include the following as far as the topic and the data of the study are concerned: (1) the illocutionary force of some utterances is mistranslated, (2) no clear distinction is drawn between isolated and group speech acts, and (3) a speech act of one class is translated as another speech act belonging to another class; in other words, there is sometimes indeterminacy in translating speech acts and this indeterminacy can be resolved by reference to the global organization of the text. To this end, extracts from some translated Arabic religious texts are selected and the problems, as regard speech acts, are specified and analyzed. Then, the extracts are translated according to the suggested pragmatic approach which is more essential than the semantic approach.

Syntactic independent sentence without illocutive force

The article deals with the factors which influence the illocutionary force of the sentence. The syntactically independent sentences are in the focus of the discussion. It is shown that illocutionary force is formed by three factors: communicative binary, semantics of the sentence and temporal reference. They are universal. At the level of the deep structure, sentences, which have illocutionary force include three components: topic, focus and modality. The presence of modal component is not possible without the topic. Sentences without any illocutionary force do not have topicalized components and are incompatible with modal indicators. At the level of the surface structure the absence of illocutionary force is marked by the displacement of the predicate to the initial position, the position of the subject after the predicate or the monomial structure of a sentence. Sentences devoid of illocutionary force in the Russian language are always marked. In German the word order is fixed, therefore, in communicatively monomial sentences, the “shift” of the verb to the first position and the displacement of the referential subject is carried out by using the formal subject es in the preposition. In English, in this case, the initial elements there or it can be used. In proposals of this type, local and time indicators are often shifted to the initial position. Neither local nor temporal indicators can be the subject of a statement: at the beginning of a sentence they mark the absence of illocutionary force. Sentences devoid of illocutionary force serve as the background of the main narrative in the text or initiate the text. At the level of semantics, the sentences of this type are characterized by providing descriptions of nature, weather, situation, state, or act as introductory sentences in microtext or text. When describing states and characteristics, we mostly refer to permanent signs or properties of objects/objects/phenomena in the environment. The factors that shape the illocutionary force of a sentence are universal.

Digital tildes (“∼”) may convey more: analyzing innovative uses of tildes in Chinese WeChat messages

Abstract Innovative uses of punctuation in online communication have become increasingly visible in research and public awareness since the 2000s, whereas studies on the innovative use of tildes (“∼”) in digital use remain scarce. Drawing on a data set of 543 Chinese WeChat messages with sentence-final tildes, this article investigates the uses and functions of innovative tildes in online communication using quantitative data and follow-up interviews. The findings suggest that: (1) The innovative tildes are deployed in messages implying sounds and performing speech acts in online communication, and they are more frequently used in speech acts (e.g., expressives and directives in particular). (2) The innovative tildes convey sound extension, i.e., to compensate for the loss of audio information in online communication and reproduce elongated sounds; pragmatic function, i.e., to enhance or mitigate the illocutionary forces of speech acts; and entertaining function, i.e., to make messages informal, vivid, joyful, and interesting. (3) The innovative tildes are pragmalicalized as a result of their semiotic features and politeness motivation of messengers for maintaining rapport and achieving successful online communication.

Dementia, Language, and Performative Force: The Case of Laughter

Abstract This article considers the form of dementia conversation as it features in literary memoirs, in sociological and drama research papers, and in theatrical works, exploring the intersubjective nature of such conversation, and in particular the way that laughter serves to structure it and connect those who engage in it. In losing our ability to remember, we also lose our ability to expect: to anticipate and organize future time. Those with dementia continue to be able to initiate, conduct, and organize conversations in time, however, and to regulate shared affect, via the “melody” of speech. We examine the ways in which certain forms of language and extralinguistic gestures remain in place when propositional speech is lost. These are forms of conversation that wield some illocutionary force, perform some action, in making ongoing relationships possible, functional, and even fulfilling. The discussion builds on the work of theater scholar Elinor Fuchs—her memoir about her mother's dementia, but also her writing about theater and the insights its formal modes have given her into dementia and ageing in general—to formulate an account of dementia language and the way it operates, as theater does, in the mode of Now.

A corpus-driven description ofoin Naijá (Nigerian Pidgin)

AbstractWidely attested in both creole and non-creole languages of the Atlantic basin, the function wordohas been traditionally described as a ‘sentence/phrase final particle’, owing to its typical syntactic behaviour, rather than to its multiple grammatical meanings. Based on the corpus-driven analysis of the NaijaSynCor, a ~400K words corpus of spoken Naijá (i.e., Nigerian Pidgin), this study suggests that sentence-finalocan be better described as an ‘illocutionary force indicator’ whose main pragmatic function is to modify the illocutionary force associated with directive and assertive speech acts. The study also provides evidence for the emergence of new coordinating and subordinating functions ofoin intra-sentential position that are semantically harmonic with its assertive (i.e. epistemic) meaning in sentence-final position. The corpus-driven analysis further shows that the higher occurrence of sentence-finaloin (formal and informal) dialogic texts in comparison to monologic texts is a reflex of its basic illocutionary function.

Between analytical mood and clause-initial particles – on the diagnostics of subordination for (emergent) complementizers

SummaryThe article addresses empirical and methodological issues that are of central concern for an assessment of uninflected function words doing services in clause-combining and/or in indicating the speaker’s stance toward illocutionary force or propositional content. Such units have been variably treated: either just as ‘particles’, as subordinating conjunctions or complementizers, or as auxiliaries of ‘analytic moods’ (marking directive or optative illocutionary force). Whatever they are called, all these units scope over clauses and manipulate their reality status. A discrimination of these types of units is difficult or hardly possible, first of all, because core notions (especially ‘(analytic) mood’ and ‘complementizer’) are ill-defined and their consequent cross-linguistic application suggests an almost arbitrary exchangeability: since the notional contrasts behind them are basically identical, clear criteria based on form and paradigmatic organization are warranted. Jointly, one needs to specify the format of the relevant units in terms of clines between morphemes and words, and between words and constructions, first of all for North Slavicbyand South Slavicda.Concomitantly, the delimitation of discourse coherence from syntactic subordination poses notorious problems. First, embedding is a property on a gradient, mainly because symptomatic shifts of egocentricals need not (and often do not) occur simultaneously. Second, there is an enormous grey zone of clausal complements vs adjuncts leaving ample space for indeterminacy. Both intensional and extensional approaches to determining clausal complements have their inherent and empirical weaknesses, and one wonders whether these might be recompensated by combining both types of approaches.The article gives a complex account of general theoretical and empirical pitfalls, with illustrations from a comprehensive body of data across Slavic on a typological background. The article also shows a principled divide between volition- and cognition-based clause connectives (and of their constructions), for which it points out inner-Slavic areal clines.