Indirect Speech Acts

Indirect speech acts are frequently used in verbal communication, the interpretation of them is ofgreat importance in order to meet the demands of the development of students’ communicative competence. Thispaper, therefore, intends to present Searle’ s indirect speech acts and explore the way how indirect speech acts areinterpreted in accordance ’with two influential theories. It consists of four parts. Part one gives a generalintroduction to the notion of speech acts theory. Part two makes an elaboration upon the conception of indirect speechact theory proposed by Searle and his supplement and development of illocutionary acts. Part three deals with theinterpretation of indirect speech acts. Part four draws implication from the previous study and also serves as theconclusion of the dissertation .

A Review of Indirect Speech Acts in Speech Act Theory

The theory of indirect speech acts proposed by John Searle is a problematic issue in speech act theory. The theory is subject to various criticisms.This essay reviews various arguments and the significant problems with reference to the indirect speech acts. The review includes some important concepts of speech act theory which are related to indirect speech acts; inference theory and idiom theory which underline indirect speech acts and their major problems in accounting for indirect speech acts.

What’ s the Context? Speech Acts Presentation in Oral English Textbooks

In this study,an evaluation of the presentation of speech acts in six oral English textbooks is conducted from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives to see how speech acts are presented and whether enough and explicit meta-pragmatic and contextual information are provided.Results show that 1)there is a paucity of speech acts and the average percentage of the six textbooks including speech acts is only 28.3%.And some speech acts like‘threatening’,‘warning’,‘declaring’,‘welcoming’are not presented at all.2)Meta-pragmatic and contextual information is too general and far from enough.Among all the six textbooks,from Book 1 to Book 5,contextual information is deduced by learners through reading conversations.Only in Book 6,a contextual description is provided before the conversation begins.Contextual information such as the age,gender and social status of Speaker and Hearer is never presented.Contextual information like the relationship between Speaker and Hearer and the place where the conversation happens is inferred from reading the conversations.Meta-pragmatic information like the degree of formality,politeness strategy,indirect speech act strategy,and social norms are not at all involved.Only in Book 1,a cultural tip is provided.Since oral English textbooks are one of the main sources for Chinese EFL learners to enhance their pragmatic competence,it is much expected that they should present a wide variety of popularly-used speech acts with rich contextual information as appropriate language input.

The Speech Acts in Cross-cultural Communication

In cross-cultural communication, miscommunication or misunderstanding is a common phenomenon because peoplefrom different backgrounds have different rules of speech acts and cultural conventions. In order to overcome the difficulties of mis-communication and improve effective cross-cultural communication, more research is needed to study the speech acts from cultureto culture. In this paper, the author mainly studies three patterns of speech acts studied by previous researchers, including apology,greeting, and compliment, discusses what previous researchers studied on the three speech acts in cross-cultural communication,and then analyzes them with real examples in cross-cultural communication.

Teaching Speech Acts in EFL Classrooms： An Implicit Pedagogy

Language teaching is a combination of teaching syntax, content of language in use, and the social background of that language. As the study of the act in speech, speech acts naturally exist in social and interpersonal discourses. Thus it is of vital importance to let language learners to acquire its concept and principles. This paper is a brief introduction to the theories and approaches on speech acts as well as its application for ELT pedagogy. The paper is made up of three parts. In the first part, former investigations and theories on speech acts would be introduced and discussed. The second part is a discussion on communicative competence in English language teaching. In the third part, two sample tasks of implicit pedagogy for speech acts would be introduced. A conclusion of teaching speech acts implicitly is given out in the fourth part.

The Acquisition of Speech Acts and Pedagogical Implications

The paper begins with the recent development of second language acquisition, in particular, L2 pragmatics, the study of acquisition of speech acts. Secondly, after exploring the distinction of competence and communicative competence, looking into the to-do-things nature of utterances as well, the paper introduces the empirical researches on acquisition of request, apology, refusal, ect. in detail, emphasizing the significant findings. The paper finally draws some practically useful pedagogical implications on the basis of acquisition of speech acts.

A Study on the Application of Indirect Speech Act Theory in CET-6 Listening

In recent years,the CET-6(College English Test,Band 6)has become an important standard to measure the English language ability of Chinese college students,and listening is a challenging task for many students.The application of indirect speech act theory in CET-6 listening is seldom studied.Therefore,it is crucial to study on it.Based on the two observation points of indirect speech act theory in CET-6 listening,this study analyzes the specific embodiment of conventional indirect speech acts and non-conventional indirect speech acts in listening,and discusses the effective teaching methods of CET-6 listening.

An Analysis of Chinese Address Terms From the Perspective of Speech Act Theory

Address terms are an important resource for conveying relationships.In daily interactions,the use of address terms is unavoidable.Therefore,the choose of address terms is particularly critical to make communicate smoothly with people.Previous scholars have studied address terms from a wide range of perspectives.But there is not much research on Chinese address terms based on speech act theory,which is put forward by John Langshaw Austin.By observing communicative conversations,several findings have been emerged from the analysis.They are professional title,affectionate address terms,and common address terms.These findings express the existential significance of address terms,which are the premise for people to maximize their illocutionary act when communicating.Correct understanding and grasp of the use of address terms is conductive to unfolding the communicative dialogue more smoothly.

＂I＇m here to discuss my final grade!＂ A study of the speech act of complaint by Malaysian ESL learners

The present study investigates the preferred strategies of the speech act of complaint by Malaysian ESL learners. The subjects were selected from Malaysian university students majoring in English at University Sains Malaysia. Data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire in the form of a discourse completion task and a semi-structured interview. The responses were analyzed based on Rinnert and Nogami＇s （2006） taxonomy of the speech act of complaint to examine the main components of complaint, the level of directness and the degree of mitigation. It is anticipated that the findings will be able to provide valuable insights into teaching and learning English in non-native settings.

Coherence inThe Star Child from Speech Act Metonymic Perspective

Based on Thornburg and Panther's theory of speech act metonymy,the paper analyzes the speech act in Wilde's fairy tale——"The Star Child".It proposes any component in the action scenario can stand for the whole scenario,and it helps save energy both for encoding and decoding during communication,and understand the coherence in a discourse.

The New Findings Made in Speech Act Theory

Through carefully studying the theory of speech acts and the literature concerning it,the author made some new findings which reflects in three aspects:the similarities and differences in Chinese and English in expressing the same speech act,the relations between different types of speech acts and the correspondence between sentence sets and sets of speech acts.

Celebrities Acting up: A Speech Act Analysis in Tweets of Famous People

Twitter has become very popular among celebrities. It is the main platform used by them to publish press releases and, especially, to reach out to their fans. Given the pervasiveness of celebrities on the site, people with related interests may be especially likely to start using the service due to the perception of direct access to a famous person. As for the celebrities, it is a way of being close to the public and giving them an insight in to the life of a celebrity. Although most celebrity Twitter accounts are only used for promotion purposes, many celebrities use their personal accounts for the purpose of communicating with their fans, friends and other celebrities. These celebrities tweet personal photos and share their inner thoughts for various reasons and to different audiences. Thus in this study I ask: What are celebrity speech patterns on Twitter? Are they talking mostly to fans, and if not, who are they talking to? How are they talking to these different audiences? I address these questions by analyzing the tweets publicly available on four active celebrities’ Twitter timelines. The findings support that these celebrities indeed address different audiences on Twitter, including fans, friends, family and other celebrities. The findings further reveal that celebrities tend to communicate using different speech acts when talking to these different audiences. In light of this evidence, I attempt to highlight patterns that may be relevant with regards to the celebrities’ gender.

Speech Act Theory And Its Influence in the Teaching of English in China

Researches done in the field of speech act theory have thrown light on the development and formation of communicative competence in the learning and teaching of foreign languages. As foreign language teachers, we can draw some revelations from the theory. It seems to us that we are obliged to use the theory to guide our teaching though it is not without its drawbacks.

Russian and English View on Lies in Conflict Dialogues—— Analysis of Conflict Communication Acts in Russian and English Fiction

What is a lie？ Why do people tell lies？ What compels them to make false utterances？ How do people treat lie, deception or fudge？ Is the attitude to them the same in different cultures？ If not, what differences are there？ An answer to these and some other questions is being sought in the paper. Producing a false utterance, the sender deprives the communication partner of the right to receive full information. The article presents views of Russians and representatives of Anglo-American culture on telling lies drawing the readers＇ attention to very serious situations, such as family conflicts between spouses, aggravated with lies. The material for analysis is taken from the texts by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and the American novel writer Irwin Shaw. The analysis is based on the study of verbal and non-verbal markers of false utterances generated by quarreling spouses. A complex method of researching the literary material combining linguistic, extra-linguistic, and paralinguistic analysis of conflict speech acts with false utterances of different kinds is applied.

Terminology Translations of Austin’s Speech Act Tripartite Model in China

Judging from the references, Chinese scholars have dozens of terminology translations on the British analytic philosopher Austin’s locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. There is no unified translation for it, and scholars did not cause enough attention to this. Thus teachers use the terms in the classroom inconsistently, resulting in doctoral students, graduates and undergraduates writing dissertations in confusion and chaos. This paper reviews and trims 25 frequently -used terminology translations of Speech Act Tripartite Model since 1955. Furthermore, some suggestions on Chinese terminology translations of it are put forward as well.

Analysis of“Versailles Literature”from the Perspective of Speech Act Theory

Versailles literature,which can be understood as fake humble in English,is a kind of internet catchphrase which became popular on a Chinese social media,Weibo,last year.This paper aims to explore the communicative intention of uploader as well as the communicative effect from the perspective of speech act theory so as to draw researcher’s attention on internet catchphrase and social media study.The result shows that sometimes people’s locutionary act do not correspondence with their illocutionary act.Also,since perlocutionary act has uncertainty,the communicative effect can be either an expected or an unexpected effect.

The New Transformations and Prospects of Speech Act Research from the Multimodal Perspective

This article sorts out the research changes on the speech act from a multimodal perspective.After collecting relevant documents from the two major retrieval systems of Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI)databases,the research direction of speech behavior in the linguistics field has shown a shift from monomodal to multimodal,and the research object has shown a shift from written language to on-site speech.The research method has changed from formalization to corpus construction.Through these changes,this article conducts a forward-looking discussion on potential research topics in the future,intending to provide assistance for future research on speech acts.

A Study of Irony in The Merchant of Venice from the Perspective of Speech Act Theory

The Merchant of Venice is one of the four classic comedies of Shakespeare.In this work,the author skillfully depicts the characters in the novel with a sharp irony,making the drama plot interlocking.Based on the Austin-Searle’s Speech Act Theory,this paper makes a macro and micro analysis of the ironic speech act in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,mainly from the literal irony,situational irony,dramatic irony three aspects of the macro-analysis of speech acts as well as the elaboration,directive,commitment,expressive irony for the micro-analysis.

Character Analysis for Love Is a Fallacy from the Perspectives of Speech Act Theory and Cooperative Principle

Love Is a Fallacy is a great work of Max Shulman, one of the America's most famous humorists. Literary pragmatics,an interdiscipline between literature and pragmatics, is concerned with the examples in which pragmatics is combined with linguistic and literary methods. Speech Act Theory, initiated by John Austin and developed by Paul Grice, has been employed in literary pragmatics. This paper aims to explore the characterization of the three roles in Love Is a Fallacy in the light of literary pragmatics. By delving into the realization of speech act and the flouting of the maxims of Cooperative Principle, the establishment process of characters can be better demonstrated.

An Exploration of the Influences of a Third Party on Chinese College Students’Speech Act of Disagreement

Face is a concept much cared about and delicately disposed among Chinese people,especially with the presence of a third party.Unfortunately so far substantial studies on patterns and politeness strategies utilized to diminish the threat to the inter-locutor's face in expressing disagreement have been carried out in English-as-the-first-language settings with lttle effort in ex-ploring disageement in Chinese culture.Therefore,this paper seeks to explore what disagreement strategies Chinese college stu-dents will use to mitigate the face-threatening act with absence or presence of a third party for an attempt to shed some light on the speech act theory in Chinese settings.