Indirect Speech Acts

Il s’agit d’un travail sur le discours rapporté (discours direct, discours indirect, discours indirect libre) à partir de la lecture de cinq manuels : "Manuel de linguistique pour les textes littéraires" (Dominique Maingueneau, 2015) ; "L'énonciation en grammaire du texte" (Michèle Perret, 1994) ; "L'énonciation en linguistique française" (D. Maingueneau, 1991) ; "Pour enseigner la grammaire" (Roberte Tomasonne, 1996) et "La représentation du “discours autre”" (Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, 2001). Nous allons expliquer en quoi consiste chaque type de discours, donner des exemples tirés de la littérature française et nous allons également les analyser afin de mieux comprendre les différences entre les uns et les autres. De même, nous allons étudier le passage du discours direct au discours indirect et vice versa. Finalement, nous allons parler des variantes du discours rapporté comme le membre quelconque d’une collectivité, le discours narrativisé ou le monologue intérieur.

This paper investigates reported speech constructions in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Sanzhi Dargwa. The language distinguishes direct and non-direct reported speech. The latter is marked in various ways such as non-finite verb forms and deictic shift. Deictic shift is a sufficient, but not a necessary criterion for non-direct speech, and frequently only some but not all deictic elements are shifted such that we get "semi-direct speech" or "biperspectival speech". In such utterances it is possible that the person feature of an argument in the speech report and its agreement exponent on the verb do not match. Furthermore, particles used to mark reported speech constructions have acquired a broader function and are also used to express hearsay evidentiality, epistemic modality, cognitive activities, etc. However, syntactically reported speech constructions differ from other complex clauses such as adverbial clauses or relative clauses due to the absence of markers that unequivocally express syntactic subordination. They can therefore be analyzed as instantiating secondary syntax. The quotative particle occurring in speech reports does not function as a syntactic subordinator, but rather signals at the pragmatic level that we deal with quotations.

Zusammenfassung: Dieser Artikel untersucht Konstruktionen zur Wiedergabe von Rede in der ostkaukasischen (nakh-dagestanischen) Sprache Sanzhi Dargwa. Die Sprache unter-scheidet direkte und indirekte Rede. Letztere wird auf verschiedene Weise grammatikalisiert, zum Beispiel durch infinite Verbformen und deiktische Verschiebung. Diese ist ein hin-reichendes, aber kein notwendiges Kriterium für die indirekte Rede, und häufig werden nur einige, aber nicht alle deiktischen Elemente so verschoben, dass wir 'semi-indirekte Rede' oder 'biperspekivische Rede' erhalten. In solchen Äußerungen ist es möglich, dass das Merk-mal Person eines Arguments in der Rede und der dazugehörige Personenmarker am Verb nicht übereinstimmen. Darüber hinaus haben Partikeln, die zum Markieren von indirekter Rede verwendet wurden, eine größere Bandbreite von Funktionen eingenommen und werden auch verwendet, um indirekte Evidenz (Hörensagen), epistemische Modalität, kognitive Aktivität und anderes auszudrücken. Syntaktisch unterscheidet sich indirekte Rede von ande-ren komplexen Sätzen, wie etwa adverbialen Nebensätzen oder Relativsätzen, durch das Feh-len grammatischer Marker, die die syntaktische Unterordnung eindeutig ausdrücken. Sie kön-nen daher als Beispiel für 'sekundäre Syntax' analysiert werden. Die in indirekter Rede vor-kommenden Zitatpartikeln fungieren nicht als syntaktische Subordinatoren, sondern signali-sieren auf pragmatischer Ebene, dass es sich um Zitate handelt.

This study presents a comprehensive pragmatic analysis of content (“wh”) questions in biblical prose. The corpus for the study is the standard classical prose corpus, comprising the prose portions of Genesis-2 Kings. A variety of functional types of content questions were identified, each differing from the prototypical information-seeking question with regard to pragmatic parameters concerning answer type, speaker knowledge, and/or immediate and higher-level goals. Biblical Hebrew appears to have an unusually high frequency of rhetorical questions and “why” questions as compared to everyday speech in modern languages. Communicative function was found to be connected to particular time reference and semantic categories. Almost all of the functional types occur in interactions between participants of varying relative social rank.

This study is about the presence of linguistic politeness in Brazilian and Spanish corporate e-mails. Applying a quantitative research technique in a corpus composed by electronic mails in Brazilian Portuguese and Peninsular Spanish, we searched for differences and/or similarities between both languages and cultures in the way of communicating via e-mails. Firstly, we discussed basic concepts about the discursive genre we used as our corpus. Following, we compared both languages regarding those concepts. Based, mainly, on sociocultural pragmatics, autonomy/affiliation (Bravo, 1999), and attenuation (Briz, 1998) studies, we analyzed Brazilian and Spanish requests. We tried to identify linguistic and sociocultural contrasts and similarities in the way of communicating written requests. We also verified the frequency and role of attenuation marks within these e-mails. Our results demonstrated some variation and resemblance in how both languages communicate requests. It seems that there is an over appreciation from the Brazilian Portuguese side, for using attenuators, in order to diminish the degree of imposition of a request, and therefore avoiding a possible instability between the interlocutors. This preference does not occur among the Spanish e-mail group. We found out that, although they are similar languages, their pragmatic choices in e-mail interaction do not seem to coincide.

This article employs a pragmatic linguistic methodology to examine the verbal conflict in the so-called “Quarrel of the Queens” episode from the Nibelung Legend of Middle High German and Old Norse literature. Völsungasaga, Þiðreks saga af Bern, and Das Nibelungenlied portray the quarrel in sufficient detail to permit a comparative assessment of strategies of verbal conflict.

For An updated and improved version of this article, see chapter two of my recent book Discourse in Old Norse Literature, available in print and digital form on Amazon and through the publisher, Boydell & Brewer.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Discourse-Old-Norse-Literature-Studies/dp/1843845970/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3THG7CF2A8QTQ&keywords=discourse+in+old+norse&qid=1646413314&sprefix=discourse+in+old+norse%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-1

B&B: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843845973/discourse-in-old-norse-literature/

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.

The present paper is a forward step towards a pragmatic perspective for  speech acts. The basic questions behind the paper are on the  interralation between direct and indirect speech acts.
    Speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act that is performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed.
    Whenever there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act. Whenever there is an indirect relationship between a structure and a function, we have an indirect speech act.

This study explores the story of Jesus and the blind man, and its main purpose is to make a detailed analysis of the text of John 9 from a speech act perspective, emphasising the function of language. The study observes whether or not this analysis also conveys acceptable and valid results as an interpretation of the text. In principle, it analyses how the implied author, by virtue of the narrator and characters, organises language so that the implied reader may recognise his intention and meaning, and his intended result be achieved on the implied reader. As the result, this study describes the story of John 9 as indeed an affirmation and illustration of Jesus’ self-revelation that he is the light of the world.

A ‘pragmatic’ reading of computer-mediated communication through an attempt to conceptualize the neologism ‘text act’ by  analyzing Facebook statuses. I first present a short introduction to the work of J.L. Austin to lay the basis for the idea of the ‘speech act’, and then attempt to claim that the same idea may be extended to text; namely to show how through computer-mediated communication (CMC) writing has shifted away from its ‘literal’ basis in favor of a pragmatic - or performative - one to form what some have already begun to call ‘text acts’. I will then elaborate on this concept and try to elucidate it through social network statuses (SNS), namely those exhibited - but more importantly - facilitated through Facebook.

This chapter offers an analysis of two types of interrogatives used as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts in English – unresolvable questions and rhetorical questions. The function of these questions is not to request information that is unknown to the speaker. It is argued that surprise-induced unresolvable questions are expressive speech acts devoid of epistemic goals. Surprise-induced rhetorical questions are shown not to suggest an obvious answer, but to request a commitment update from the addressee. Adopting a schema-theoretic approach to surprise, it is shown that unresolvable questions and rhetorical questions can express mirativity, the former at the initial stage of the cognitive processing of unexpectedness, the latter at the last stage.

This article revisits the notion of indirect speech acts (ISA) in the light of a weak formulation of the classical Literal Force Hypothesis. It is argued that ISAs are actually instances of unspecified illocutions, which allows for the positing of a conventionalization cline in their realization. Under these assumptions, we revise current theories of ISAs and make a number of proposals to overcome their limitations: (1) (Multiple source)-in-target metonymies and illocutionary ICMs are postulated to account for the motivation and rich conceptual fabric of illocutionary categories, respectively; and (2) a more flexible model of illocutionary constructions is sketched in terms of base configurations and specification links in order to explain the multi-faceted nature of illocutionary performance.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

Keyword: pemerolehan bahasa, struktur kalimat, ujaran dan MLU.
ABSTRAK Pada tahun pertama kehidupan anak-anak mulai meniru kata-kata yang mereka dengar dari lingkungan sekitarnya dan dapat dikatakan pada saat itulah anak mulai menghasilkan "kata-kata pertama" mereka. Saat mereka berusia 18 bulan kata-kata yang mereka hasilkan semakin banyak dan berubah dari kalimat satu kata menjadi kalimat dua kata dan tiga kata. Penelitian ini dilakukan berdasarkan teori biologis-kognitif Chomsky yang menyatakan bahwa setiap anak dilahirkan dengan potensi biologis untuk berbahasa dan teori Skinner karena pemerolehan dan perkembangan bahasa terjadi bukan karena potensi biologis tersebut saja tetapi juga karena adanya lingkungan bahasa yang mendukung. Untuk mengetahui pemerolehan sintaksis bahasa Indonesia anak usia tiga tahun, lima anak yang berusia tiga tahun dan terpaut maksimal tiga bulan dijadikan objek penelitian ini. Percakapan mereka dengan orang tua dan keluarga mereka direkam, kemudian percakapan tersebut dianalisis untuk mengetahui kalimat-kalimat yang mereka hasilkan berdasarkan modus kalimat yaitu panjang kalimat, struktur kalimat, dan rata-rata panjang ujaran berdasarkan Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). Kalimat-kalimat yang dihasilkan anak usia tiga tahun tersebut kemudian dianalisis untuk mengetahui panjang kalimat, struktur kalimat, dan pengukuran ujaran dengan MLU. Kata kunci: pemerolehan bahasa, struktur kalimat, ujaran dan MLU. ABSTRACT In the first year of life children begin to imitate the words they heard from the surrounding environment and to say that's when the child begins to produce "first words" them. When they were 18 months of the words that they produce more and more and turns of phrase one word into a sentence of two words and three words. The research was conducted based on a biological-cognitive theory of Chomsky who states that every child born with biological potential for language and theory of Skinner for language acquisition and development is not due to the biological potential, but also because of the language environment that supports. To find out the acquisition of syntax Indonesian children aged three years, 10 children aged three years and closed to within a maximum of three months were subjected to this study. Their conversations with parents and their families are recorded and then the recorded conversations were analyzed to determine the sentences they produce based on the mode of sentence is the sentence length, sentence structure, and measurement of speech with the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). The resulting sentences of three-year-olds are then analyzed to determine the sentence length, sentence structure, and measurement of speech with mlU. It was found that most children aged three years in said generally truncated words. And mastery of language that dominated the child obtained through certain stages. Children aged three years has been able to construct a sentence in said although it is very simple and limited. And speech analysis showed an average three-year-olds are at 2.327 MLU has V stages, which means being on a low stage.

The Mistaʿarvim are Jewish undercover agents who masquerade as Arabs in order to infiltrate Palestinian and other Arab societies in the service of the Israeli military. The first Mistaʿarvim unit, which served in the pre-1948 Palmach Zionist militia, was based on Jews of Arab origin. Arabs in appearance and in speech, these undercover Jewish agents masqueraded as Arabs to blend into Arab communities without raising suspicion. They successfully executed their operations only by transforming their Arab selves into a performative imitation of ‘Arabs’ as Others. Complying with the Zionist binary separation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ as two different identities, they broke their originally hyphenated Jewish-Arab identity, and in return they gained heroic acceptance into the exclusively Jewish nation in Israel. In this article, we examine how the military-oriented tactic of histaʿarvut (the infinitive form of acting as Mistaʿarvim) sheds light on performative acts in the field of popular music, whereby a Jewish Israeli identity is asserted through a ‘masked’ performance of Arabs. As an act of self-imitation, ‘cultural histaʿarvut’ includes symbolic borrowing of visual, linguistic, or musical elements from Arab and Palestinian cultures in order to stage a masked performance that ‘crosses’ the cultural lines to ridicule or demean Arabs and their culture, as a means of Jewish Israeli entertainment. Drawing on this, we introduce the term ‘sonic masquerading’ to elaborate on the specific performative uses of the Arabic accent and musical features as an example of cultural histaʿarvut in the work of the Israeli musicians Shefita, Daniel Saʿadon, and Tuna.

Martı, L. (2000). Cross-cultural speech act realisation: The case of requests in the Turkish speech of Turkish monolingual and Turkish-German bilingual speakers (pp. 383-391). In A. Göksel and C. Kerslake (eds). Studies on Turkish Linguistics and Turkic Languages: Proceedings in The Ninth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, Oxford, 12-14 August 1998. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Conversational implicatures, as a widely examined instance of indirect communication, can enrich philosophical pursuits in many domains. Applied to the field of the epistemology of testimony, the theory of conversational implicatures raises many questions that could in turn provide novel insights about how we should treat other people’s testimonies. The problem is not whether people acquire knowledge and form their beliefs on the basis of other people’s words or on the basis of their beliefs – the problem lies in being able to detect those cases in which beliefs and words do not match. I suggest that the use and the decoding of implicatures is a rational process and that correctly formed implicature-based beliefs are justified because of their rationality. I also suggest that minor differences between the speaker’s and the hearer’s communicative moves can generate cases of epistemic (bad) luck that can be treated as predictable outcomes of a communicational faux pas.

"This anthropological study describes a specific form of mediation, as it is practiced in Ethiopia (Northeast Africa) by members of the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups. It introduces elders as male household-heads in their advanced ages, who settle conflicts and arrange marriages for the members of the junior generations. There are not only 'easy' cases dealt with, which one might assume to be too 'unimportant' for state courts or other juridical institutions but also aggravated cases that may affect the wider group or that have inter-ethnic dimensions. The study uses specific case studies of marriage, bride abduction, physical injury and homicide for illustration. Within the book, reference is made to speech-act-theory and the 'new ethnographic' approach related to it. Both rhetoric strategies and non-verbal means of communication are discussed, such as postures, gestures, spatial arrangements, numerical symbolisms, or the deliberate use of certain kinds of dress and of material objects. Special attention is paid to the use of ritual in mediation procedures. The book brings to light significant regularities that are inherent to the different types of elders' proceedings. Peculiar elements and phases can be distinguished that re-occur in all types of processes analysed in the study. This cannot exclusively be explained by reference to 'process', as a general idea of people negotiating law. It moreover hints to the existence of a formal 'procedure', which follows its own rules. Accordingly, a change of perspective 'from process to procedure' is suggested in the book's programmatic title.

http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_2776.ahtml

Book Order US:
http://www.amazon.com/From-Process-Procedure-Aethiopistische-Forschungen/dp/3447066113/

Book Order Germany:
http://www.amazon.de/Process-Procedure-Mediation-Formality-Ethiopia/dp/3447066113/
http://www.buchhandel.de/detailansicht.aspx?isbn=9783447066112"

Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals' difficulties in indirect requests comprehension; others suggest that it might be preserved in HFA. Furthermore, the role of Theory of Mind in understanding indirect requests is an open issue. The goal of this work is twofold: first, assessing whether comprehension of indirect requests for information is preserved in HFA; second, exploring whether mind-reading skills predict this ability. We tested a group of (n = 14; 9-12 years) HFA children and two groups of younger (n = 19; 5-6 years) and older (n = 28; 9-12 years) typically developing (TD) children in a semi-structured task involving direct, indirect and highly indirect requests for information. Results suggested that HFA can understand indirect and highly indirect requests, as well as TD children. Yet, while Theory of Mind skills seem to enhance older TD children und...

The distinction between direct and indirect speech has long been known not to reflect the crosslinguistic diversity of speech reporting strategies. Yet prominent typological approaches remain firmly grounded in that traditional distinction and look to place language-specific strategies on a universal continuum, treating them as deviations from the “direct” and “indirect” ideals. We argue that despite their methodological attractiveness, continuum approaches do not provide a solid basis for crosslinguistic comparison. We aim to present an alternative by exploring the syntax of logophoric speech, which has been commonly treated in the literature as representative of “semi-direct” discourse. Based on data from two unrelated languages, Wan (Mande) and Ainu (isolate), we show that certain varieties of logophoric speech share a number of syntactic properties with direct speech, and none with indirect speech. Many of the properties of indirect speech that are traditionally described in ter...

Pragmatic competence is a constituent of overall communicative ability, and within pragmatic competence, implicature comprehension is itself a constituent. This generates studies on teaching implicature comprehension, most of which are lacking in qualitative probes into how attributable the ensuing performance changes are to the instructional materials and procedures themselves. Nevertheless, effective assessment of pedagogical interventions/innovations would require experimental studies to be adopted along with qualitative research for in-depth understanding from participants' perspective. In this regard, through semi-structured retrospective interviews, the current study investigated how far and in what ways the performance changes after a project on teaching implicatures via film could be ascribed to the treatment itself. The content analysis results indicate that the performance changes originated mainly from the instruction and illuminate the share of the filmic materials as the innovative component there. On account of these, with its epistemological approach enabling triangulation, the study contributes to instructional pragmatics by providing an exemplary practice of quality assurance in teaching implicature comprehension/interpretation.

Abstract: The article considers strategies of expressing reportative speech in Udihe. It is shown that the Euro-centric ideas about "direct" and "indirect" speech as main types of reportative speech are not supported by the facts of this language. Udihe uses a different system, based on a strict distinction between levels of the cited speech, as well as between author's and reportative speech. This distinction is realized by marking not only the beginning, but also the end of the reportative passage.

In this paper I describe the grammatical markers and relevant lexical elements used in different types of interrogative sentences in Bashkir, and their distribution.
I discuss polar and alternative questions in Bashkir, which both involve a special interrogative particle =mE, and their intonation patterns, and review the non-interrogative uses of the particle =mE. I discuss content questions (“wh questions”), including the inventory of interrogative words, their position, and the intonation patterns used in such questions. I review the attested peripheral markers used in interrogative sentences, i. e. tag-like and particle-like markers, which are mostly used in biased questions. Finally, I discuss the expression of some special types of questions, including non-standard illocutionary types (“deliberative”, permissive, and hortative), echo questions, and embedded questions.

This investigation deals with the prosodic differences between Chilean Spanish sentences without syntactic markers that could be interpreted as either requests or commands (e.g GIve me the pencil, Close the door). Factors such as length and pitch variations are acoustically analysed. Also, a phonological analysis using the Autosegmental Metric Model is suggested.

Drawing on fifteen video-recorded planning meetings as data, and on conversation analysis as a method, I examine the interactional import of the common Finnish practice of constructing a proposal as a thought. As a point of departure, I consider two different types of conditional utterances in which a speaker presents a plan: (1) ‘asking conditionals’ (jos ‘what if’ prefaced declarative conditionals and interrogative conditionals) and (2) ‘stating conditionals’ (declarative conditionals). While asking conditionals mark the plan as contingent on the recipient’s approval and involve a straightforward request for the recipient to engage in joint decision-making about the proposed plan, stating conditionals are regularly treated as informings about plans in which the recipients have actually no word to say. However, when asking and stating conditionals are prefaced with references to the speakers’ thoughts (mä aattelin et ‘I was thinking that’), the projected responses and sequential trajectories are more open-ended: the participants have the opportunity to share the responsibility, not only for what is to be decided with respect to the proposed plan, but also for what is to be jointly decided upon in the first place. Constructing a proposal as a thought seems thus to be a practice with which participants may enable the symmetrical distribution of deontic rights at the very beginning of joint decision-making sequences.