Дулатова С. Б.,Таджибаева А.А.

Региональный социально – инновационный университет

SPEECH ACT THEORY IN LINGUOPRAGMATICS

Speech act theory is now receiving great attention and valid theoretical proposals from cognitive linguists. Klaus Panther and Linda Thornburg (1998) claim that our knowledge of illocutionary meaning may be systematically organized in the form of what they call ‘illocutionary scenarios’ [1]. They are formed by a before, a core, and an after component. If a person wants someone to bring him his pen, he can utter a direct speech act like ‘Bring me my pen’, which exploits the core component, or he can make his request indirectly exploiting either the before component (‘Can you bring me my pen?’) where the modal verb ‘can’ points to the hearer’s ability to perform the action, or the after component (‘You will bring me my pen, won’t you?’) where the auxiliary ‘will’ instantiates the after component of the request scenario.

Manifold aspects of the theory are being debated such as the classification of speech acts, the relationship between speech acts and culture, and the acquisition of speech acts by children, which proves how this area of language research still provides room for developments and new insights.

«People commonly think of communicating as acts of expressing oneself. This rather vague idea can be made more precise if we get more specific about what is expressed. Take the case of an apology. If you say, "[I'm] sorry I forgot your birthday" and intend this as an apology, you are expressing regret for something, in this case for forgetting the person's birthday. An apology just is the act of (verbally) expressing regret for, and thereby acknowledging, something one did that might have harmed or at least bothered the hearer. It is communicative because it is intended to be taken as expressing a certain attitude, in this case regret. It succeeds as such if it is so taken, in which case one has made oneself understood. Using a special expression such as the performative "I apologize" “I am sorry” may of course facilitate understanding -- understanding is correlative with communicating. Communicative success is achieved if the speaker chooses his words in such a way that the hearer will, under the circumstances of utterance, recognize his communicative intention. So, for example, if you spill some beer on someone and say "Oops" in the right way, your utterance will be taken as an apology. [2]

Advances in speech act theory and conversation analysis are rooted in the point that we can use words not only to describe situations but also to perform actions in conversation. Therefore, when we say things like:

The food is delicious

I wish I could make it to the party, but I have a lot of work to do

Watch out

We are actually communicating actions like

· Compliments

· Refusals

· Warnings

Thus, under the correct circumstances, a speaker can “perform” things like apologies, requests, refusals.

We can also perform communicative actions without directly naming them. For example, to realize a refusal, someone may not always say:

I can`t go to your party; I have a lot of work to do

Instead, we can perform the same actions indirectly. So ,If someone says:

I wish I could make it to the party. I have a lot of work to do

The whole utterance can be understood as a refusal without directly naming the action “refusal”.

We use speech acts daily in a variety of situations such as complaints and we would like to have a deeper look to cover the situations in speech acts , that is, direct and direct complaint in the English language.

A complaint is an expressive speech act that can be expressed directly or indirectly: Indirect Complaints, Direct Complaints

«An indirect complaint is defined as “the expression of dissatisfaction to an interlocutor about oneself or someone/something that is not present” [3]. The following exchange between two graduate students who express their dissatisfaction with a course is an example of an indirect complaint:

A: I sat through yesterday's class with total non-comprehension!

B: Oh, yesterday was the worst!

 In other words, An indirect speech act is a kind of circumlocution, an attempt to save the face of the addressee. The indirect complaint, for example, is a type of negative evaluation. A negative evaluation is a speech act that evaluates some person or situation through an utterance that carries a negative semantic load. An indirect complaint is defined as the expression of dissatisfaction to an addressee about oneself or someone/something that is not present. It differs from a direct complaint in that the person concerned is neither held responsible for nor capable of remedying the situation.

«In a direct complaint a speaker expresses displeasure or annoyance as a result of a past or ongoing action that affects him/her unfavorably.

Unlike other speech acts such as expressions of apology or compliments, the speaker who complains addresses an interlocutor directly and uses various strategies of displeasure that precede or follow a direct complaint.

 Research has revealed that realising complaints varies across speakers from different cultures. For example, when complaining to a professor about an unfair grade, English speaking people, especially, Americans expressed a direct complaint (‘I think …in my opinion, maybe the grade was a little low'), while in the East, learners of English preferred a criticism over an explicit complaint (‘…. You don't recognize my point')».

Literature:

1. Searle J. R. (1975). ‘Indirect speech acts’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds)

2. Olshtain, E.& Weinbach, L. (1987). Complaints—A study of speech act behavior among native and non-native speakers of Hebrew. In M.B.Papi & Verschueren (eds.), The pragmatic perspectives: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference (195-208). Amsterdam: Benjamins. 

3. DeCapua, Andrea. 1998. Pragmatic transfer and cultural stereotyping. IAL (Issues in Applied Linguistics) 9(1): 21–36