Performative Verbs Research Articles

Teaching Performative Verbs and Nouns in EU Maritime Regulations

This paper is concerned with performative speech acts in European Union fisheries legislation with a view to relating the semantic analysis of directive and expressive speech act verbs to politeness strategies for the management of positive and negative face. The performative verbs used in directive and expressive speech acts belong to the semantic domain of communication verbs. The directive verbs occurring in the material are: appeal, authorize, call upon, conclude, invite, promise, request, urge and warn while the expressive verbs are: congratulate, express (gratitude), pay (tribute) and thank. The semantic analysis of directive verbs draws on Leech's framework for illocutionary verbs analysis (Leech, 1983: 218). The analysis suggests that the choice of directive and expressive speech act verbs and their co-occurrence with particular addressees are motivated by the socio-pragmatic situation. 30 Naval Engineering students from the UPM also learned how these speech act verbs are used in context in the subject English for Professional and Academic Communication (2011-2012).

Перформативное употребление глаголов просить/ попросить и моля/помоля в русском и болгарском языках: прагматическая роль вида и времени

Svetlana Slavkova: Performative Use of the Verbs prosit′/poprosit′ and molja/po-molja in Russian and Bulgarian: The Pragmatics of Aspect and TenseIn this article, I examine the illocutionary potential of some directives in Russian and Bulgarian in terms of categories of politeness and interpersonal distance. I show that the interplay between tense and aspect parameters of Russian performative verb pair prosit′/poprosit′ and respective Bulgarian pair molja/pomolja serves a wide range of pragmatic functions. Compared with other directives the analyzed verbs can be considered pragmatically most intensive, as they assume a greater number of situations and contexts in which a management of the interpersonal distance between the interlocutors is necessary.

Direct reported speech as a frame for implicit reflexivity

By articulating the notions of reflexivity and participant roles in the context of direct reported speech, the present study aims to contribute to a better understanding of discourse and interaction in storytelling events. Direct reported speech, I find, counts as a reflexive resource not only because it re-presents other speech, but also because it frames the activity of the metanarrator, as attested by the embedding of overtly reflexive elements (instances of direct reported speech, indirect reported speech and performative verbs) and the display of implicitly reflexive processes such as word search, repair and lexical choice. I arrive at the conclusion that those explicitly reflexive resources -such as metanarrative comments- which involve the momentary suspension of the reporting speech, occur only in extreme cases in which the audience’s understanding of the narrative is in risk from the teller’s perspective. Otherwise, the tendency prevails to keep direct reported speech consistent with the position and point of view of the corresponding figure.The narratives analyzed here were recorded in Spanish among bilingual Totonac-Spanish storytellers from three different villages of the Mexican State of Veracruz.

Polskie i bułgarskie umowy prawa cywilnego jako teksty modelowe i ich zastosowanie w dydaktyce przekładu

In this paper the author describes Polish and Bulgarian templates of civil law contracts and presents the following templates of texts: 1) internal organisation of texts and its graphical presentation, 2) obligatory and optional elements, 3) type of communication strategy chosen. To enable the comparative analysis of texts, a strong weighting towards its use in the language is recommended. Specific properties of legal texts include the following: identification of activities with the use of the thirdperson verb (singular or plural), frequent appearance of impersonal verb forms and passive voice, performative verbs, fixed idiomatic expressions, saturation with legal language. Textual properties are illustrated with corresponding examples in both languages. The author focuses particularly on translation difficulties which can occur in the translation process and emphasizes the need to use parallel texts in translation didactics.

Polskie i bułgarskie umowy prawa cywilnego jako teksty modelowe i ich zastosowanie w dydaktyce przekładu

In this paper the author describes Polish and Bulgarian templates of civil law contracts and presents the following templates of texts: 1) internal organisation of texts and its graphical presentation, 2) obligatory and optional elements, 3) type of communication strategy chosen. To enable the comparative analysis of texts, a strong weighting towards its use in the language is recommended. Specific properties of legal texts include the following: identification of activities with the use of the thirdperson verb (singular or plural), frequent appearance of impersonal verb forms and passive voice, performative verbs, fixed idiomatic expressions, saturation with legal language. Textual properties are illustrated with corresponding examples in both languages. The author focuses particularly on translation difficulties which can occur in the translation process and emphasizes the need to use parallel texts in translation didactics.

‘Denuncio pero lo lamento …’: Attitudinal hedges and the pragmatics of the explicitly performative verb in Spanish

Article ‘Denuncio pero lo lamento …’: Attitudinal hedges and the pragmatics of the explicitly performative verb in Spanish was published on January 1, 2013 in the journal Multilingua (volume 32, issue 1).

KUTADGU BİLİG'DEKİ EDİMSÖZ EDİMLERİ

In this paper, it has been analysed illocutionary acts in Qutadgu Bilig that is a first voluminous text of Islamic Turk litereture. Illocutionary acts are one group of speech acts. Speech acts are actualized by speaking, and they are one of important isues of historical pragmatics. Historical pragmatics analyses linguistic forms and particulars in texts that they have been writen far long ago, and is focused to study use of language and that how is mean established in past context. Historical pragmatics is a issue of recent date that has been developed in area of historical linguistics, and have been increased count of diachronic speech act studies that are about differant languages. However in Turkish language area this kind studies are inconsiderable. Speech acts are cultural and temporal items. Performative verbs have a special semantic and pragmatic area. Each people establishe own special speech acts and performative verbs. Studies of speech acts illuminate us about norms and values of a special communite. Qutadgu Bilig is a fictional text. However fictions echo real world. But in a fictional text, real world is reflected as diminished, enlarged and excerpted. In this paper, it had been attempted determining, classifying illocutionary acts and relations between them, functions of illocutionary acts of Qutadgu Bilig. Thus it had been aimed to reveal norms and values of Turkish world of Qarakhanid period.

Życzenia i winszowanie jako akt mowy

Wishing and congratulating as a speech act
 The paper attempts to synthesize and revise the views on wishing and congratulating as specific speech acts which are represented in Polish by the performative verbs życzę, życzymy ‘I/we wish’, winszuję, winszujemy ‘I/we congratulate’, by optative formulas based on aspect operators (niech, oby, aby, żeby ‘let’, ‘so that’ &c.), and sometimes also by imperative sentences. It examines the conditions of fortuitousness of the wishes and their illocutive value, and especially the quite questionable honorific function of wishing formulas, and their connection with the linguistic relics of primitive magical thinking. The proposed interpretations emphasize the cultural and pragmatic function of wishes, rooted in history and tradition.

News reporting in the Philippines: English in print media

: This study aims to determine how a hostage drama in Iraq involving an overseas Filipino worker was framed in English-language newspapers in the Philippines. Data came from the July 9–25, 2004 issues of five leading English-language broadsheets in the Philippines. The study found that the event was given maximum salience and prominence by the newspapers. In addition, the participant ‘Philippine government’ was foregrounded; the rest of the participants were backgrounded. In terms of activity, the performative verbs ‘saying’ and ‘asking’ were assigned to the topicalized/thematized participants in the data, thus making these participants agents or actors.

Illocutionary Force and Romanian Orthodox Sermons: An Application of Speech Act Theory to Some Romanian Orthodox Sermons

Illocutionary Force and Romanian Orthodox Sermons: An Application of Speech Act Theory to Some Romanian Orthodox Sermons The aim of the paper is to analyze religious discourse with the use of the instruments of semantics and pragmatics. Essentially, it sets out to identify the linguistic elements which enable the illocutionary force in the Romanian orthodox sermons, especially in the discourse of some important figures which have influenced and still influence the Romanian orthodox theology and the religious life in Romania: Father Cleopa, Father Nicolae Steinhardt, and, nowadays, Father Teofil Pârâianu. It is usually assumed that a sermon implies, on the one hand, a kerugmatik action, that of annunciation, and, on the other hand, a translating action of the biblical induce the human will to practice the words in order to Christian precepts. Mutatis mutandis , the perlocutionary effect depends on the illocutionary act and of the illocutionary force. In theory, the illocutionary force of an utterance is strictly motivated by the pragmatic (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu 2003). But there are linguistic elements which function as efficient markers of the illocutionary force (Austin 1962: 73-76), for example performative verbs, verbal moods and some adverbs. The criteria proposed by Searle in order to differentiate the illocutionary acts (illocutionary point of utterance, direction of fit, psychological state, intensity, etc.) resulted in the identification of several types inside this class. Searle's taxonomy serves the research purposes: the identification of illocutionary acts found in this kind of religious discourse and, finally, outlining a pattern of manifestation of the illocutionary force inside the sermon.

Coherence in Workplace Instant Messages

In our case study, we examined the instant messaging (IM) workplace discourse of a pair of expert IM users. We found that the participants maintained discourse cohesion and thus coherence via short, rapidly sent transmissions that created uninterrupted transmission sequences. Such uninterrupted transmission sequences allowed each participant to maintain the floor. Also, the participants used topicalizations and performative verbs to maintain coherence. We also found that the participants' use of short transmissions may have ambiguated their enactment of their institutional roles and the rights afforded to them by those roles.

An Investigation into the Legal Translation Guideline: With Special Reference to the Korea-US FTA

The translation guideline (institutional translation) as a research topic has been overlooked for so long. The under-representation of this line of enquiry in Translation Studies (TS) seems attributable largely to lack of research subjects, i.e. translation guidelines. It is very interesting, in this respect, that the Korean government unveiled a translation guideline for the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) in 2007 in order to promote the public's understanding of the trade accord. This study examines the KORUS FTA translation guideline from the viewpoint of legal translation. The KORUS FTA translation guideline is comprised of three parts: (1) General Translation Principles; (2) Glossary; and (3) References. The discussion in this paper is centered around the first part (General Translation Principles) that contains some important aspects of legal translation. They are ‘literalness,’ ‘legal terminology,’ ‘plural marking,’ ‘plain Korean movement’ and ‘performative auxiliary verbs,’ to name but a few. After analyzing the guideline from the standpoint of legal translation, this paper explores the implications of the guideline for both TS and translation practices.

Public (non-) apologies: The discourse of minimizing responsibility

The frequent realizations of apologies in the global arena since the beginning of the 1990s, has turned the speech act into a common device for image restoration. In spite of the advantages that public figures can benefit in contemporary politics of trust from apologizing, the speech act still poses a threat to the public figure's image. Apologies can undermine the public figure's desired face, and project an image of a person who is lack of professional capabilities. The aim of this paper is to examine how public figures realize creative forms of apologetic speech in order to minimize their responsibility for misdeeds, while calculating the costs and benefits in producing apology utterances. Based on the analysis of 354 apologies made in the Israeli public discourse between 1997 and 2004, I demonstrate tactics which range on four main categories of minimizing responsibility for misdeeds: compromising the apology's performative verb (e.g. using the verb sorry or regret instead of apologize), blurring the nature of the offense (e.g. by apologizing for a specific component, rather than the entirety of the offense), questioning the identity of the offended (e.g. claiming that no one should be offended by the act) or questioning the identity of the offender (e.g. explicitly denying direct responsibility for the offense).

From “Sorry very much” to “I'm ever so sorry”: Acquisitional patterns in L2 apologies by Catalan learners of English

This paper analyzes the acquisitional stages of L2 apology realizations in response to discourse completion tasks produced in a cross-sectional study by 78 Catalan learners of English at three di¤erent proficiency levels. The average number of explicit apologies (IFIDs) used per situation is exam- ined, as are the learners' lexical choice of apology performative verbs, on the one hand, and the degree and type of apology intensification (both lex- ical and phrasal) they use, on the other. The learner data is compared to analogous British English and Catalan native speaker data. The paper dis- cusses pragmatic transfer, as well as the types of interlanguage behavior of each of the three groups of L2 learners

Que fait l’adjectif sacré dans les jurons (sacré nom de dieu, sacré nom d'un petit bonhomme, etc.) ?

Our aim is that the adjective sacré constitutes an object of completely justifiable study, including in the most marginalized uses which constitute the French swearword sacré nom de dieu. In a diachronic perspective, we utter the hypothesis that sacré nom de dieu could result from prepositional NPs (au nom de dieu / par le nom de dieu), initially governed by performative verbs, whose use is extended until to cover those of sacré nom de dieu, been attested much more late. Simply, sacré nom de dieu also knows additional uses, to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic plans which make that far from being a "secondary constituent" in the swearword.

The production and perception of implicit performatives

The present research examined how people perform and perceive implicit performatives, i.e., speech acts that do not contain the performative verb. In Experiment 1 participants were asked how they would perform various speech acts (e.g., beg, brag, blame) when they could not use the performative verb. Consistent with speech act theory, utterances were frequently performed by referencing the relevant felicity conditions for the appropriate illocutionary points. Experiments 2 (using a sorting task) and 3 (using a rating task) examined the psychological reality of Searle's [Searle, John, 1979. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge] speech act classification scheme. Both experiments suggest that people tend to group implicit performatives in terms of their underlying emotional valence (a perlocutionary effect) rather than their illocutionary points.

Zeitrichtung in der Bedeutung der russischen performativen Verben

The paper analyses the direction in the tense of performative verbs („Zeit­richtungsbezug“). The tense in the constative verbs is going straight from left to right, in the performative verbs - in the opposit direction. The paper is based on E. Koschmieder's theory of tense.

A modal shock absorber, empathiser/emphasiser and qualifier

The modal auxiliary can occasionally occurs, as it seems redundantly, in sentences like “I can promise that you'll like it”, a usage that has sometimes been difficult to explain. Its occurrence in the CobuildDirect Corpus is here investigated, and it appears that it typically occurs with three types of verbs: performative verbs, verbs of perception and verbs of mental processes. Far from being redundant, it carries out a number of important functions, labelled Shock absorber, Empathiser/Emphasiser and Qualifier. It is finally suggested that its use in those functions will explain why it predominantly occurs with the three types of verbs.

"Que" inicial átono como marca de modalidad

Unstressed que-inital constructions have been traditionally treated as instances of conjunction-headed structures, preceded or not by an implicit performative verb. In this paper it is argued that such an explanation runs into problems when gwe-constructions are faced with their interrogative counterparts, which also show unstressed-initial que. As an alternative, que is considered a modality marker, whose main function is to show, in these constructions, the speaker's stance with regard of the proposition. In this light,, a unified account of interrogative, affirmative and exclamative instances of unstressed que-initial sentences can be provided.

Библейские перформативы предписания в словенском языке

The paper analyses the prescriptive Biblical performative verbs zapovedovati(zapovedujem), ukazováti(ukazujem), narocati(narocam) and constructions such as to jemoja zapoved, novo zapoved vam dam, izdajam povelje. The verb zapovedovati is never used performatively in the commandments of the Old Testament. The first person singular form only reports a given situation. In their performative use the prescriptive verbs signal a new situation.