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CONTENTS



   INTRODUCTION…………….……………………………………….3



      1. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION…………5


      2. WHY DO SPEAKERS HAVE TO BE INDIRECT?…………………..7
      2.1. The cooperative principle…………………………………………….7
      2.2. The theory of politeness ……………………………………………...8

      3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS
         AND “DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?…………………………….10
      3.1. The inference theory………………………………………………...10
      3.2. Indirect speech acts as idioms?…………………………………...…12
      3.3. Other approaches to the problem……………………………………13

      4. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN A
          DISCOURSE………………………………………………………….14

          5.INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN……..16
5.
          6.EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN MODERN
         ENGLISH DISCOURSE………..…………………………………….18
      6.1. Fiction………………………………………………………………18
      6.2. Publicism……………………………………………………………20
      6.3. Advertising………………………………………………………….21
      6.4. Anecdotes…………………………………………………………...21


          7. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AS A YARDSTICK OF COMMUNI-


             CATIVE MATURITY AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING …..….23


             CONCLUSIONS……….……………………………………………..25


         РЕЗЮМЕ……………….…………………………………………….27


         LITERATURE….…………………………………………………….28



                                INTRODUCTION



“A great deal can be said in the study of



 language without studying speech acts,



 but any such purely formal theory is



 necessarily incomplete. It would be as if



baseball were studied only as a formal



system of rules and not as a game.”


         John Rogers Searle


      In the late 1950s, the Oxford philosopher John Austin  gave
some lectures on how speakers  “do  things  with  words”  and  so
invented a theory of “speech acts” [10, 40]  which  now  occupies
the central place in pragmatics (pragmatics is the study  of  how
we use language to communicate in a particular context).   Austin
highlighted the initial contrast between the constative  and  the
performative. While constatives  describe  a  state  of  affairs,
performatives (explicit and implicit) have the potential to bring
about a change in some state of affairs.  Classical  examples  of
performatives include the naming of a ship, the  joining  of  two
persons in marriage, and the  sentencing  of  a  criminal  by  an
authorised person. Austin distinguished between the locution of a
speech act (the words uttered), its illocution (the intention  of
the speaker in making the utterance)  and  its  perlocution  (its
effects, intended or otherwise).  Whereas  constatives  typically
have truth conditions to comply with, speech  acts  must  satisfy
certain “felicity conditions” in order to  count  as  an  action:
there must be a conventional  procedure;  the  circumstances  and
people must be  appropriate;   the  procedure  must  be  executed
correctly and  completely;  often,  the  persons  must  have  the
requisite thoughts, feelings, etc.
      John Austin’s theory of  speech  acts  was  generalized  to
cover all utterances by a student of Austin's, John Rogers Searle
[43, 69]. Searle showed that we perform speech acts every time we
speak. For example, asking “What's the time?” we  are  performing
the speech  act  of  making  a  request.   Turning  an  erstwhile
constative into an explicit performative looks like this: “It  is
now ten o’clock” means “I hereby pronounce  that  it  is  ten  o’
clock in the morning.”
         In such a  situation,  the  original  constative  versus
performative  distinction  becomes  untenable:  all   speech   is
performative.  The  important  distinction  is  not  between  the
performative and the constative, but between the different  kinds
of speech acts  being  performed,  that  is  between  direct  and
indirect speech acts.  Searle's hypothesis was that  in  indirect
speech acts, the speaker communicates the non-literal as well  as
the literal meaning to the hearer.  This new pragmatic trend  was
named   intentionalism because it takes into account the  initial
intention of the speaker and its interpretation by the hearer.
      Actuality of research:
      The problem  of  indirect  speech  acts  has  got  a  great
theoretical meaning for analysis of the form/function relation in
language: the same form performs more than  one  function.     To
generate  an  indirect  speech  act,  the  speaker  has  to   use
qualitatively different types of knowledge, both  linguistic  and
extralinguistic (interactive and encyclopaedic), as well  as  the
ability to reason  [45, 97]. A number of theories try to  explain
why we make indirect speech acts and how we understand their non-
literal meaning,  but  the  research  is  still  far  from  being
complete.
      The practical value of research lies in the fact that it is
impossible to reach a high level of linguistic competence without
understanding the nature of  indirect  speech  acts  and  knowing
typical indirect speech acts of a particular language.
      The tasks of research:
analysis of the theories on indirect speech acts;
finding out  why  interlocutors  generate  indirect  speech  acts
instead of saying exactly what they mean;
comparing  typical  indirect  speech  acts  in  English  and   in
Ukrainian;
providing  examples  of   indirect   speech   acts   in   various
communicational situations.
      The object of research is a speech act as a communicational
action that speakers perform by saying things in a certain way in
a certain context.
      The subject of research is an indirect speech  act  as  the
main way in which the semantic content of a sentence can fail  to
determine the full force and content  of  the  illocutionary  act
being performed in using the sentence.
      Methods of research include critical analysis of scientific
works on the  subject,  analysis  of  speech  of  native  English
speakers  in  various  communicational  situations,  analysis  of
speech behavior of literary personages created by modern  British
and American writers.



                 INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION


“Communication is successful not when

hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the

utterance, but when they infer the speaker's

meaning from it.”

              Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson



      Most of what human  beings  say  is  aimed  at  success  of
perlocutionary  acts,  but  because  perlocutionary  effects  are
behavioural, cognitive,  or  emotional  responses  they  are  not
linguistic objects. What linguists can properly look at, however,
are  the  intentions  of  speakers   to   bring   about   certain
perlocutionary effects which are called illocutionary intentions.

      The basis of a speech act is  the  speaker’s  intention  to
influence the hearer in a  desired  way.  The  intention  can  be
manifested and latent.  According  to  O.G.  Pocheptsov  [13,74],
latent  intentions  cannot  be  linguistically   analyzed   while
manifested intentions can be divided into evident and  inferable.
The illocutinary intention of indirect speech acts is inferable.
        Three  broad  illocutionary   categories   are   normally
identified – a statement, a  question  and  a  command/request  -
having typical realisations  in  declarative,  interrogative  and
imperative verb forms. But sometimes  the  syntactic  form  of  a
sentence is not a good guide to the  act  it  is  performing.  In
indirect speech acts the agreement between the intended  function
and the realised form breaks down, and the outward  (locutionary)
form of an  utterance  does  not  correspond  with  the  intended
illocutionary force of the speech  act  which  it  performs  [37,
263]. In indirection a single utterance is the performance of one
illocutionary act by way of performing another.  Indirect  speech
acts have two illocutionary forces [45, 195].
      Searle’s classical example of an indirect speech act is the
utterance  “Can  you  pass  the  salt?”  Without   breaking   any
linguistic norms we can regard it as a general question and  give
a yes/no answer.  But  most  often  hearers  interpret  it  as  a
request.    Likewise, the utterance “There's a fly in your  soup”
may be a simple assertion but, in a context,  a  warning  not  to
drink the soup. The question “What's the time?” might,  when  one
is looking for an excuse to get rid of  an  unwelcome  guest,  be
intended  as  a  suggestion  that   the   guest   should   leave.
Analogously, the statement “I wouldn't do this if I were you” has
the congruent force of an imperative: “Don't do it!”
      In his works Searle gives  other  interesting  examples  of
indirect speech acts: Why don’t you be quiet? It would be a  good
idea if you gave me the money now. How many times have I told you
(must I  tell  you)  not  to  eat  with  your  fingers?  I  would
appreciate it if you could make  less  noise.  In  some  contexts
these utterances  combine  two  illocutionary  forces  and  sound
idiomatic, even though they are not idioms in the proper sense of
the term.   Each  utterance  contains  an  imperative  (secondary
illocution) realized by  means  of  a  question  or  a  statement
(primary illocution).
      Paul  Grice  illustrates  indirectness  by  the   following
utterances [4, 22]: “There is a garage around the corner” used to
tell someone where to get petrol, and “Mr. X's command of English
is excellent, and his attendance has been  regular”,  giving  the
high points in a letter of recommendation. A simple example of an
indirect speech act gives B.Russel: “When parents  say  ‘Puddle!’
to their child, what they mean is  ‘Don’t  step  into  it!’  [41,
195].  These  are   examples  in  which  what  is  meant  is  not
determined by what is said.
       We can make a request or give permission by way of  making
a statement, e.g. by uttering “I  am  getting  thirsty.”  or  “It
doesn't matter to me.” We can make a statement or give  an  order
by way  of  asking  a  question,  such  as  “Will  the  sun  rise
tomorrow?” or “Can you clean up your room?” When an illocutionary
act is performed indirectly, it is performed by way of performing
some other one directly.
      It has been found that indirect expressives, directives and
representatives compose  the  most  numerous  group  of  indirect
speech acts [11, 23].
      The study of indirect speech acts  has  mostly  dealt  with
requests in various guises. Jerrold  M.  Sadock  identified  some
exotic species: “whimperatives” - indirect requests in  the  form
of a question, e.g. “Can't you (please) do  something?”  and  “Do
something, will you?”;  “queclaratives” -  the  speaker  directly
questions and indirectly makes an assertion: “Does  anyone  do  A
any more?” meaning "Nobody does A any  more";  “requestions”  are
quiz questions to  which  the  speaker  knows  the  answer,  e.g.
Columbus discovered America in ...? [42, 168].
      Summarizing, we can say that indirection is the main way in
which the semantic content of a sentence can  fail  to  determine
the full  force  and  content  of  the  illocutionary  act  being
performed in using the sentence.



                    WHY DO SPEAKERS HAVE TO BE INDIRECT?


“Everything   that    is    worded    too    directly    nowadays

                                                             runs
the risk of being socially condemned.”

                                       Ye. Klyuev

                       2.1. The cooperative principle
               An insight  into  indirectness  is  based  on  the
Cooperative  Principle  developed  by  Paul  Grice  [4,   14-76]:
language  users  tacitly  agree  to  cooperate  by  making  their
contributions to the conversation to further it  in  the  desired
direction. Grice  endeavoured  to  establish  a  set  of  general
principles explaining how language users convey indirect meanings
(so-called conversational implicatures,  i.e.  implicit  meanings
which have to be inferred from what is being said explicitly,  on
the basis of logical  deduction).  Adherence  to  this  principle
entails that speakers simultaneously observe 4 maxims:
       1) Maxim of Quality:
      - Do not say what you believe to be false.
      - Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
      2) Maxim of Relevance:
           - Be relevant.
      3) Maxim of Quantity:
           - Make your contribution as informative as required.
           - Do not make your contribution more informative than
is required.
      4) Maxim of Manner:
           - Avoid obscurity of expression.
           - Avoid ambiguity.
           - Be brief.
           - Be orderly.
      This general description of the normal expectations we have
in conversations helps to explain a number of regular features in
the way people say things. For instance, the  common  expressions
"Well, to make a long story short" or "I won't bore you with  the
details" indicate an awareness of  the  maxims  of  quantity  and
manner. Because we assume that other speakers are following these
maxims, we often draw inferences based on this assumption.
      At   one   level,   cooperative   behaviour   between   the
interactants means  that  the  conversational  maxims  are  being
followed; but at another and more  important  level,  cooperative
behaviour still operates even if the  conversational  maxims  are
apparently broken.   For instance, when the speaker blatantly and
openly  says  something  which  appears  to  be  irrelevant   and
ambiguous (flouts the maxims of relevance and manner), it can  be
assumed that  s/he really intends to communicate something  which
is relevant and unambiguous, but does so implicitly:
      “ - I don't suppose you could manage tomorrow evening?
        - How do you like to eat?
                  - Actually I rather enjoy cooking myself.”  [J.
Fowles]
      The second remark, instead of  being  a  direct  answer  (a
statement), is a question formally not connected with  the  first
remark.  The maxims of relevance  and  manner  are  flouted.  The
inferable  implicature  is:   “Yes,   I   can.”Analogously,   the
implication of the third remark is inferred:  “I  invite  you  to
have           dinner           at           my           place.”

        If we were forced to draw only logical  inferences,  life
would be a lot more difficult. Conversations  would  take  longer
since we would have to say things which reasonable language-users
currently infer.
      Searle adds one more conversational maxim [45, 126]: “Speak
idiomatically unless you have a reason not  to.”  He  exemplifies
this maxim like this: if we say archaically “Knowest thou him who
calleth  himself  Richard  Nixon?”   (not   idiomatically),   the
utterance will not be perceived as a usual question “Do you  know
Richard Nixon?”
        An important difference between implicatures and what  is
said directly  is  that  the  speaker  can  always  renounce  the
implicatures  s/he  hinted  at.  For  example,   in   “Love   and
friendship” by A.Lourie the protagonist answers to a lady  asking
him to keep her secret: “A gentleman never talks of such things”.
Later the lady finds out that he did let out her secret, and  the
protagonist justifies himself saying:  “I  never  said  I  was  a
gentleman.”
        Implicatures put a question of insincerity and  hypocrisy
people resort to by means of a language (it is not by chance that
George Orwell introduced the word “to double speak” in his  novel
“1984”). No doubt,  implicatures  are  always  present  in  human
communication.    V.Bogdanov  notes  that  numerous  implicatures
raise the speaker’s and the hearer’s status in each other’s eyes:
the  speaker  sounds  intelligent  and  knowledgeable  about  the
nuances of  communication,  and  the  hearer  realizes  that  the
speaker  relies  on  his  shrewdness.   “Communication   on   the
implicature level is a prestigious type of verbal  communication.
It  is   widely  used   by   educated   people:   to   understand
implicatures, the hearer must have a proper intellectual  level.”
(Богданов 1990:21).
      The ancient rhetorician Demetrius declared  the  following:
“People who understand what you do not literally say are not just
your  audience.  They  are  your  witnesses,   and   well-wishing
witnesses at that. You gave them an occasion to show  their  wit,
and they think they are shrewd and quick-witted. But if you “chew
over” your every thought, your hearers will decide  your  opinion
of their intellect is rather low.”    (Деметрий 1973:273).


                        2.2. The theory of politeness

      Another line of explanation of indirectness is provided  by
a sociolinguistic theory of  politeness  developed  in  the  late
1970s. Its  founder  Geoffrey  Leech  introduced  the  politeness
principle: people should  minimize  the  expression  of  impolite
beliefs and maximize the expression of polite beliefs [36,  102].
According to the politeness theory, speakers avoid threats to the
“face” of the hearers  by  various  forms  of  indirectness,  and
thereby  “implicate”  their  meanings  rather  than  assert  them
directly. The politeness theory  is  based  on  the  notion  that
participants are rational beings with two kinds of  “face  wants”
connected with their public self-image [26, 215]:
      • positive face - a desire to be appreciated and valued  by
others; desire for approval;
      • negative face - concern for certain personal  rights  and
freedoms,  such  as  autonomy  to  choose  actions,   claims   on
territory, and so on; desire to be  unimpeded.
      Some speech acts (“face  threatening  acts”)  intrinsically
threaten the faces. Orders and requests, for  instance,  threaten
the negative face, whereas criticism  and  disagreement  threaten
the positive face. The perpetrator therefore  must  either  avoid
such acts altogether (which may  be  impossible  for  a  host  of
reasons, including concern for her/his own face) or find ways  of
performing  them  with  mitigating  of  their  face   threatening
effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a  son  to
his father) “Are you using the car tonight?” counts  as  a  face-
respecting strategy because it leaves room for father  to  refuse
by saying “Sorry, it has already been taken (rather than the face-
threatening “You may not use it”). In that sense,  the  speaker’s
and the hearer’s faces are being attended to.
      Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in  its
qualitative aspect  (what is considered to be polite), but in its
quantitative aspect as well  (to  what  degree  various  language
constructions realize the politeness principle). Of course  there
are absolute markers of politeness, e.g. “please”, but  they  are
not numerous. Most of language units gain  a  certain  degree  of
politeness in a context.



             3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AND
                          “DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?
      It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech  acts
the  relationship  between  the  words  being  uttered  and   the
illocutionary force is often oblique. For example,  the  sentence
“This is a pig sty” might be used nonliterally to  state  that  a
certain  room  is  messy  and  filthy  and,  further,  to  demand
indirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used
literally and directly, say to  describe  a  certain  area  of  a
barnyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by
its linguistic meaning - in particular, the meaning of  the  word
“this” does not determine which area is being referred to.
      How do we manage to define the illocution of  an  utterance
if we cannot do that by its syntactic  form?  There  are  several
theories trying to answer this question.

                            The inference theory
      The basic steps in the inference of an indirect speech  act
are as follows  [37, 286-340]:
   I. The literal meaning and force of the utterance are computed
      by,  and  available  to,  the  participants.  The  key   to
      understanding of the literal  meaning  is  the  syntactical
      form of the utterance.
      II. There is some indication that the  literal  meaning  is
inadequate (“a trigger” of  an indirect speech act).
        According to Searle, in indirect speech acts the  speaker
performs one illocutionary act but intends the  hearer  to  infer
another illocution by relying on their mutually shared background
information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic,  as  well  as  on
general  powers  of  rationality  and  inference,  that   is   on
illocutionary  force  indicating  devices   [43,   73].       The
illocutionary point of an  utterance  can  be  discovered  by  an
inferential process that attends to the speaker's  prosody,   the
context of utterance, the form of the  sentence,  the  tense  and
mood  of  verbs,  knowledge  of  the  language  itself   and   of
conversational conventions, and general encyclopaedic  knowledge.
The speaker knows this and speaks  accordingly,  aware  that  the
hearer - as a competent social being and  language  user  -  will
recognize the implications  [32, 41].  So, indirectness relies on
conversational implicature: there is overwhelming  evidence  that
speakers expect hearers to draw inferences from  everything  that
is  uttered.    It  follows  that  the  hearer  will  begin   the
inferential process  immediately  on  being  presented  with  the
locution. Under the cooperative principle, there is a  convention
that  the  speaker  has  some  purpose  for  choosing  this  very
utterance in  this  particular  context  instead  of  maintaining
silence or generating another  utterance.  The  hearer  tries  to
guess this purpose, and  in  doing  so,  considers  the  context,
beliefs about normal behaviour in this context, beliefs about the
speaker, and the presumed common ground.
       The fact that divergence between the form and the contents
of an utterance can vary within certain limits helps to  discover
indirect speech acts: an order can be disguised as a  request,  a
piece of advice or a question, but it is much less probable as  a
compliment.
      III. There are principles  that  allow  us  to  derive  the
relevant indirect force from the literal meaning and the context.
      Searle  suggests that these principles can be stated within
his theory of felicity conditions for speech acts [44, 38].
      For example, according to Searle’s theory, a command  or  a
request has the following felicity conditions:
      1. Asking or stating the preparatory condition:
      Can you pass the salt? The hearer's ability to  perform  an
action is being asked.
      Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request.
      2. Asking or stating the propositional content:
      You're standing on my foot. Would you  kindly  get  off  my
foot?
      Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it
is a request.
      3. Stating the sincerity condition:
      I'd like you to do this for me.
      Literally it is a statement; non-literally it is a request.
      4. Stating or asking the good/overriding reasons for  doing
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