Indirect Speech Acts Research Articles

Explicit performatives revisited

The paper defends a version of a traditional account of explicit performatives, according to which they are a kind of self-verifying indirect speech act, from recent arguments by Jary and Pagin. I rely on a distinction, made by Bach, between a locutionary and a stative sense of what is said. Although derivations of conversational implicatures and indirect speech acts in general need only depart from the locutionary sense of what is said, and do not require the stative sense (so the speaker does not need to be actually asserting the literal content), in response to Jary's and Pagin's arguments I argue that in the case of explicit performatives speakers do assert it, even if only on their way to making the speech act they primarily intend to perform.

The Determination of Affirmative and Negative Intentions for Indirect Speech Acts by a Recommendation Tree

For context-based recommendation systems, it is necessary to detect affirmative and negative intentions from answers. However, traditional studies can not determine these intentions from indirect speech acts. In order to determine these intentions from indirect speech acts, this paper defines a recommendation tree and proposes an algorithm of deriving intentions of indirect speech acts by the tree. In the proposed method, a recommendation condition (RC) is introduced and it is classified into a required RC, a selectable RC, and a not-selectable RC. The recommendation tree is constructed by nodes and edges corresponding to these three conditions. The deriving algorithm determines affirmative and negative intentions of indirect speech acts by tracing the trees. From experimental results, it is verified that the accuracy of the proposed method is about 40 points higher than the traditional method.

Les actes de langage indirects sont-ils tous conventionnels ?

This paper focuses on the variety of ways to communicate a directive illocutionary act in modern French. I argue that every type of directive speech act can be regarded as stemming from a convention, be it a linguistic one, for on-record speech acts, or a discursive one, for off-record speech acts. The various acceptations of the “conventionality” applied to on-record indirect speech acts (ISAs) are reconsidered. More specifically, I claim that the distinction, in terms of politeness, between on-record and off-record ISAs does not coincide with the opposition between conventional and non-conventional speech acts. Second, I show that it is necessary to identify two types of conventions or communicative strategies to perform off-record directives. The first consists in referring to a reason to act; the second is evoking the requested action.

The Creative Voice: Free Indirect Speech in the Cinema of Rohmer and Bresson

This article examines a particular use of the voice in cinema which conveys character reflexivity and generates expressive ambiguity in a film's narrative point of view. Drawing on Pasolini's notion of the free indirect style and Deleuze's elaboration of this into his concept of the free indirect speech-act, two different creative uses of speech are analysed: one in Rohmer's Claire's Knee (1970) and the other in Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951). The essay finds that when characters narrate their thoughts, feelings, actions or experiences in a reflexive manner (that is, to themselves, even if also to another), and this activity becomes for a time the primary event of the film, these characters step into the role of storyteller. They become both subject and object of their utterances which take on the style of the free indirect. With this, the voice enters into a new relationship with the image – directing, counterpointing, or disconnecting from it – changing the function of voice and image while seeming momentarily to supplant the film's narration. The symbolic nature of language gives words the power to create images and meaning that cannot be captured or conveyed by the camera alone. Privileging speech as a creative force not only dimensionalises character but, on a formal level, creates a role for voice that allows it to exist not as an appendage to the image but for its own sake. In order to suggest practical uses for these theoretical considerations, Bresson's and Rohmer's reflections on the role of the voice are also discussed.

Responding indirectly

In this research, we analyse the sequential environments in which indirectness is used in everyday conversations. This is a distinct break with traditional research into indirectness, which often focuses on the psychological conditions for felicitously doing and/or comprehending an indirect speech act. This innovative approach allows us to show what interactional pressures there are to respond indirectly – in effect, why speakers sometimes respond indirectly. One of the interactional pressures we note is that utterances consisting only of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ are often not treated as adequate responses, even to syntactically polar questions. Upon receiving such responses, participants regularly pursue further information. So, rather than produce responses that are only superficially matched to the syntactic structure of the prior inquiry, speakers can and do produce responses that display their analysis of the activity being pursued in that inquiry – so-called indirect responses. We show that by responding indirectly, one participant can uncover the prior turn's agenda, or can display that a previous inquiry is inapposite in some way. Such explanations for why indirect responses are produced can come only from the analysis of naturally occurring conversations. For certain activities, in specific sequential locations, responding indirectly may be the most efficient form of communication.

한․영 의문문 형식의 간접 화행 연구

In this study, the realization aspect of Indirect Speech Acts(IDSA) in Korean and English are compared to clarify the reason we use the method of IDSA despite we can perform speech acts directly. The subject of analysis was limited to interrogative sentences and TV drama scripts were used as research materials. As a results, the major motives to perform IDSA were found to be 'lessening the burden' and 'emphasizing'. It is interesting that the same method can give two opposite effects. Because of the reason that performance and understanding of IDSA ultimately realize on the context of verbal communications, pragmatical factors should be considered to infer the meaning of IDSA. The significance of this study can be found in the respect of considering the speaker's intentions delivered through IDSA in relation to the situations in which IDSA is performed.

The interpretation of Indirect Speech Acts in relevance theory

Despite being mentioned by most textbooks on semantics and pragmatics, only very little research on indirect speech acts has been published since the beginning of the 1980s 1 . One possibility, one might speculate, is that its advocates, predominantly Searle (1979: 30-59) and Bach & Harnish (1979: 173-202), have said everything on the subject that needs to be said. However, judging from the few things that have been published, the reason seems rather to be one of general puzzlement about the significance of indirect speech acts. A couple of more prominent figures among these are Sperber & Wilson (1995: 243-254) who, although they do not address indirect speech acts directly, argue that speech act theory has very little to contribute to pragmatics. This paper examines their general skepticism about speech act theory and tries to establish what implications it might have for the notion of an indirect speech act. More specifically, the author is interested in the question as to whether it would be desirable to preserve the notion for a specific set of data extracted from the 2004 US Presidential debates between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry. This data not only appears to be different from that examined by Searle (1979: 30-59) and Bach & Harnish (1979: 173-202), but also to require a different type of explanation. However, in an attempt to keep the parallel to their work as transparent as possible, the paper mainly considers interrogative utterances that can be argued, or already have been argued, to involve indirect speech acts – questions being one of, if not the, dominant category among the original examples. Finally, in the end of the paper a revised, relevance-theoretic, definition of an indirect speech act is offered; which suggests that it might comprise as many as four different types of phenomena.

Indirect Speech Acts in English Discourse: Implied Meanings in Movies

Indirect Speech Acts in English Discourse: Implied Meanings in Movies

A Study of Indirect Directives Speech Acts in Thai Language

A Study of Indirect Directives Speech Acts in Thai Language

“On Indirect Speech Acts and Linguistic Communication: A Response to Bertolet”

AbstractSuppose a diner says, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. On this account then, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts.

Ontology-based query processing for understanding intentions of indirect speech acts in natural-language question answering

In an attempt to develop a robust method for achieving natural-language question answering, we propose a method for ontology-based query processing to infer intentions from indirect speech acts that do not express the real intentions explicitly. In this method, the real intentions of the indirect speech act are classified into one of five intention classes such as 'refusal' and 'reversal'. Furthermore, we construct an ontology for intention transition, which is composed of concepts for events and their relations attributed with the above intention classes. In addition, we construct an ontology of objects for the targets of events – e.g. 'files' and 'figures', which also contains special relations such as 'exclusive'. Given the two above ontologies, an algorithm is proposed to infer users' actual intentions. This proposed method was tested with human subjects and a prototype system. The system successfully inferred the intentions for approximately 80% of the subjects' indirect speech acts.

An Analysis of the Realization of Indirect Speech Acts Presented in the Lower Level KFL Textbooks

An Analysis of the Realization of Indirect Speech Acts Presented in the Lower Level KFL Textbooks

Information as metaphorical and allegorical construction: some methodological preludes

Metaphors, allegories and other kinds of indirect speech-acts and catachretical phrases are usually considered to be the very opposite of scientific theories. An alternative can be identified in the constructivists’ approach, dealing with catachretical expressions as a starting point for the explication of scientific language games. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate such an alternative point of view, dealing with metaphorical applications of the term “information” within biological narratives.

On Multiple Metonymies within Indirect Speech Acts

Indirect speech acts are frequently structured by more than a single metonymy. The metonymies are related not only to the illocutionary force of the utterances, but also function within the individual lexemes being their parts. An indirect speech act can thus involve not only multiple, but also multi-levelled operation of conceptual metonymy.

Irony in a judicial debate: analyzing the subtleties of irony while testing the subtleties of an annotation scheme

Irony has been studied by famous scholars across centuries, as well as more recently in cognitive and pragmatic research. The prosodic and visual signals of irony were also studied. Irony is a communicative act in which the Sender’s literal goal is to communicate a meaning x, but through this meaning the Sender has the goal to communicate another meaning, y, which is contrasting, sometimes even opposite, to meaning x. In this case we have an antiphrastic irony. So an ironic act is an indirect speech act, in that its true meaning, the one really intended by the Sender, is not the one communicated by the literal meaning of the communicative act: it must be understood through inferences by the Addressee. The ironic statement may concern an event, object or person, and in this case, the Addressee, or a third person, or even the Sender itself (Self-irony). In this paper we define irony in terms of a goal and belief view of communication, and show how the annotation scheme, the Anvil-Score, and illustrate aspects of its expressive power by applying it to a particular case: ironic communication in a judicial debate.

Politeness Strategies in Biblical Hebrew and West African Languages

Most languages have a wide variety of strategies for communicating politeness, however these are always highly culture-specific and relate closely to broader cultural norms that affect the application of Grice’s maxims, for example. Focus strategies include the use of greetings, modal particles, and various forms of participant reference. Typical initial greetings may take the form of wishes or blessings in biblical Hebrew but questions in West African languages (which reserve wishes and blessings for leave-taking and thanking); therefore, more literal translations may invite misunderstanding. Pragmatic particles in biblical Hebrew are often misunderstood. West African languages may lack these altogether, and so they have to resort to longer idiomatic expressions. Participant reference in biblical Hebrew may involve metaphors from service or kinship terminology; these may combine with special uses of grammatical person in honorific addressee-reference and deprecating self-reference. Some of these observations may shed light on features of the Psalms which have traditionally been read more as poetics than as pragmatics. Indirection strategies may be employed in the form of euphemisms or Indirect Speech Acts, the most common form of which in biblical Hebrew is the rhetorical question, which may have a range of pragmatically-defined functions, though the forms may differ from those of West African languages. The two primary biblical Hebrew verbal conjugations also have special pragmatically-defined functions, including the restriction of deontic use of qāṭal (the ‘precative perfect’) to human address of God, restriction of deontic use of yiqṭōl (the ‘preceptive imperfect’) to divine address of humans, and the use of yiqṭōl in questions. West African languages may need to resort to a wide variety of strategies to express such modal nuances. These notes raise questions as to the extent to which translators may “Africanize” the speech of actants in biblical narratives.

Indirect Speech Acts

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts,particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech actsand to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. Weprovide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, includingthe subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisanalysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speechact level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just as co-predicationshows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously'of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too.Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both thelexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or ``preemptionby synonymy'': Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their`paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even ifthis interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. Weprovide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it withexisting accounts of lexical blocking.

The pragmatics of verbal parody

In this paper, we develop a model of verbal parody based on the view that parody is a human behavior. We argue that verbal parody involves a highly situated, intentional and conventional expressive made up of four essential acts: (1) the intentional re-presentation of the object of parody, (2) the flaunting of the verbal re-presentation, (3) the critical act, and (4) the comic act. To successfully create a verbal parody, a speaker must manipulate all four essential acts with the intent to create parody. In the second section of our paper, we address the potential scope of parody in real communication. We explain how parody serves to celebrate the object it apparently ridicules, by appealing to politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987). We also argue that the object of parody may be anything in the world; that a single parodic act may have multiple objects; and that the re-presenting verbal expression of the parodic speech act may function as a direct or indirect non-parodic speech act, which may be enhanced or inhibited by the parody.

Can You Answer a Question for Me? Processing Indirect Speech Acts

Two experiments explored how subjects identify the speech acts of utterances. In particular, they compared models in which the direct speech act is derived first, and two "parallel" models in which direct and indirect meanings are on equal footing. Subjects in Experiment I were given questions that were plausible or implausible in their direct and indirect meanings, and were asked to judge whether each item had a plausible direct meaning. The presence of a plausible indirect meaning slowed decision time, showing that indirect meaning could not be ignored and was derived no later than direct meaning. Subjects in Experiment 2 were given the same four question types within a story and were asked to answer them as if they were the person being asked. Response times were equivalent for sentences that had one plausible meaning (direct or indirect) or both direct and indirect meanings. The results were taken as evidence for a model of speech act processing in which a single plausible interpretation is derived for each sentence, regardless of whether it is direct or indirect.

The Performance Force of the Interrogative in Colloquial Russian: From Direct to Indirect Speech Acts

1.1 Linguistic and philosophical research on speech act theory the past two decades has focused primarily on the properties of written and spoken English. Wierzbicka (1985) and Zemskaja (1988) have lamented this shortcoming, further claiming that previous studies suffer from ethnocentrism, inasmuch as they assume that the strategies and semantic formulas for performing a given speech act in English are available to speakers of every other language.' In an attempt to address more cross-linguistic issues, the monograph series Typological Studies in Language examined a number of linguistic topics, including Interrogativity (1984), from a wide variety of languages. Despite the wealth of data and the scope of the individual works, such studies taken individually cannot be considered truly comparative. Bernard Comrie's contribution on interrogativity in Russian, for example, cited only a few pragmatic co-occurrences of the interrogative as an indirect speech act in Russian and English.2 Due to the broader focus of his study and the paucity of spoken data, Comrie limited his observations to a few general remarks on the performance force of the interrogative. The very recent monograph, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (1989), has significantly advanced cross-linguistic research on pragmatics of linguistic behavior. Although Russian was not considered in the study, researchers drew from such diverse linguistic cultures as Canadian French, Danish, Australian English, and Hebrew. In her highly informative intro-