LESSON 9-1
Speech Acts
Whenever we say something, we perform a speech act; that is, we intend to do something with the words we utter, e.g., make statement, ask a question, request something, order someone to do something for us, and so forth. Each of these functions—what we intend to do with language—is called a speech act. Speech acts enable us to use language in different contexts, to accomplish many purposes. We’ll cover direct and speech acts and communicative competence in this subsection, and briefly touch on performative verbs.
In many cases, there’s a
direct relationship between the linguistic form of an utterance and its speech
act/pragmatic function. For example, in
English, statements ordinarily have a SVO order, as in (1).
(1)
I had a very nice
weekend.
The sentence in (1) is
intended as a simple statement (somewhat informative), and its linguistic form
reflects that. English questions, on
the other hand, normally employ the word order of AUX S V O, as in (2).
(2)
Did you have a nice
weekend?
In (2), the function of
question (the act of asking a question) is obvious from its form. The term direct speech act is used to
refer to cases like (1) and (2) where there is a one-to-one correspondence
between the linguistic form and its pragmatic function.
There’s a special class of
verbs called performatives where the verb itself—its very
utterance—indicates the speech act associated with the sentence. Let us consider a couple of examples, where
the performative verb is underlined:
(1) I hereby promise to pay you back the million
dollars I’ve borrowed from you.
(2) By the powers vested in me by the State of MN, I declare
you husband and wife.
(3) I bet you 10 bucks.
What’s interesting about
these verbs is that the speech act associated with the verb cannot take place
unless you utter the verb. That is, a
promise is not really a promise unless one says ‘I promise.’ (1) would be a legally binding statement;
you cannot promise and mean something else.
[yes, you could lie, but there would be legal repercussions.] At this
point, you may say, “how about ‘I will pay you back.’ Isn’t that a promise?”
It may be interpreted as such; however, it is not as strong as ‘I promise.’ In fact, often speakers will ask others to say,
“I promise” when they want to elicit a clear, unambiguous promise from them.
Well, language works in
mysterious ways, and human beings use language in many ways to perform different
functions. When the relationship
between a linguistic form and the speech act associated with it is not direct,
we have an instance of an indirect speech act. Your textbook gives many examples of indirect acts; let us
consider some here:
(1) Can you open the door? (Form: question, function: request)
(2) I am cold. (Form: statement, function: request—when
uttered to friend, asking her indirectly to close the door)
(3) There’s a lion behind you. (Form: statement, function: warning)
(4) Where did you find that sweater? (Form: question, function: compliment--or an
insult if a hideous sweater)
Indirect speech acts can be
problematic for ESL students, who may react to/respond to the actual form
rather than the intended speech act.
Knowledge of speech acts and
when they can be appropriately used (called felicity conditions) is part
of our communicative competence.
Communicative competence goes beyond the notion of grammatical
competence, which—you will recall—is our implicit knowledge of grammar that
enables us to utter/understand grammatically correct sentences in our
language. Communicative competence
includes not only our ability to produce grammatically correct sentences but
also the ability to interpret/use them appropriately in a given context. Teaching ESL means teaching both.
How a specific speech act
will be performed linguistically varies across languages/cultures. For example, in some cultures it is
perfectly OK to complement someone on their weight gain (and I am thinking of
moving to such a place after the Holidays!); while in the US culture it is not
under normal circumstances. (If someone
is trying to gain weight, etc, then a different situation, of course.)
In our discussion on
sociolinguistics, we’ll talk about communicative competence more. Let me conclude this subsection by
reiterating that you’d need to cover both direct and indirect speech acts in
your ESL classes.
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Click
on 9-2 to go to the next subsection.