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.

A review of speech Acts

Pragmatics is a relatively new subject compared with other linguistic studies.In this paper,we will review the definition of pragmatics and its scope.Then a detailed review of speech acts will be shown in the second part of the paper.It is mainly about many aspects of speech acts,such as its definition,classification,felicity conditions and so on.The last part of the paper is the prospects of application of pragmatics.

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.

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.

The Necessity of Teaching Pragmatic Skills and Speech Acts in L2 Classroom

The current article mainly focuses on identifying pragmatic skills and speech acts,along with illustrating pragmatic failures in sec ond language learners.On the other hand,a brief discussion of the necessity of teaching pragmatic skills and speech acts is provided.

On Indirect Speech Acts

Indirect speech act theory is a part of pragmatics. In indirect speech acts the speaker often says one thing to mean something else. It is essential for the learners of language to know not only literal meaning of a sentence, but also its illocutionary act. So people can efficiently communicate with each other.This paper uses some examples to illustrate some functions and usage of indirect speech acts.

A New Approach to Speech Acts——The Interactive Nature of Communication with Emphasis on Perlocution

One of the most compelling notions in pragmatics is Speech Act.Among the subacts, the Perlocutionary Act tells us something about people’ s motivation for using a particular speech act.This paper justifies an interactive approach to speech act with perlocution as the pivot.Then it attempts to explore the stages of the interactive communication process in this new approach.Typical real -life examples are provided respectively in the course of analysis.

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.

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 .

Reflection and Optimization of Primary English Teachers' Speech Acts Based on Speech Act Theory

The primary English teacher's speech acts have major impact on foreign language teaching and learning in primaryschool.Application of teacher,s speech acts in the classroom is actually a kind of selective process.From the perspective of SpeechAct Theory,primary English teachers can optimize their speech acts with the strategies of activating the greetings with proper con-text information,standardizing teacher talk,choosing suitable questions,providing appropriate feedback for pupils’classroom per-formances in order to improve the effectiveness of primary teachers,classroom speech acts.

Refusal Speech Acts in Chinese and American English

Refusals are frequently performed in our daily lives.Based on the speech act theory of Austin and Searle,with the theoretical frame of the politeness theory put forward by Brown and Levinson,It presents a comparative study of speech acts of refusal in Chinese and American English.The results show that refusals vary in directness with situations and cultures;On the one hand,both languages employ the three directness types,namely the direct refusal speech act,ability of negation and indirect refusal speech act,and prefer indirect refusals.The situational variability of directness in both languages follows a similar trend.On the other hand,Americans are more direct than Chinese.Furthermore,Chinese shows the lower degree of situational variation in the use of the three directness types.People' s choices of refusal strategies are influenced by social power and social distance.From all these evidence,we maintain that the cross-linguistic differences are due to basic differences in cultural values.

Investigating Pragmatics of Complaint Speech Acts in English and Chinese

The speech act of complaint is an important research subject of pragmatics,which is worthy of research among speech acts.With the development of research into speech acts,some scholars have performed investigations of complaints,but they have done little work on Chinese language complaints.Therefore,it is necessary to make a further study on complaint as a speech act in Chinese.This thesis is based on speech act theory and the politeness principle as an empirical study of the speech act of com plaint in Chinese.It aims to provide a more complete and comprehensive result of participant production of the speech act of complaint.

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.

An Essay to Searle's Typology of Speech Acts

With knowing how to make sounds with the vibration of vocals,humans are not just intending to make meaningless noi-ses,but also to communicate with each other thus they make 'languages'.For example,if a girl accepts a boy's invitation to a con-cert,she will reply him in a basic way with'I will see you in front of the theatre by 7pm tomorrow!'.After the amazing concert,the girl may express the feeling with'What a wonderful concert!Thank you for inviting me this time! '.Then she wants to invite him for a movie next time,so she asks'Do you want to watch this movie next week with me? '.They may create more simple but significant sentences like these to communicate with each other for the basic requests,invitations or expressions to improve their relationship.The communications in the example are the main topic for my following essay,which is to discuss the basic pragmatic way of people com-municating with each other and the significance of the theory of speech acts profound by an American Philosopher John R.Searle.

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.

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.

Speech Act of Refusal-A Proposal from an Interlanguage Pragmatic Perspective

This paper is to present a typology of refusal strategies which may be employed in the analysis of refusal performance from a discourse approach.Some previous research carried out is reviewed in order to classify non-native speakers' production of this speech act.Then,the suggested taxonomy will be described in a systematized way from an interlanguage pragmatic perspective and within a conversational analysis framework.Finally,it is emphasized that effective communicative competence plays an important role in the production of this face-threatening speech act of refusing.

Subtitle Translation of Puns in English Sitcoms from the Perspective of Speech Act Theory——A Case Study of Mind Your Language

Puns always play a vital role in sitcoms in order to create humor or ironies.Sometimes good translations of puns can decide whether target language audiences are able to obtain the equal understandings and reactions of the sitcoms as source language audiences get.Nevertheless,it is not easy for many translators to render faithfully and smoothly some English puns into Chinese.Therefore,this paper will analyze the subtitle translation of puns in the British sitcom Mind Your Language from the perspective of Speech Act Theory so as to find out some useful and helpful strategies for translation of puns in subtitling.

A Brief Account of Vague Language in Advertising Based on Speech Act Theory

In the modern world, advertising plays an important role in commercial field and permeates in all aspects of our daily life. While due to the utilitarian essen ce of advertising, audience may have resistance or This thesis objects at vague language examples in advertisements, use Austin and Searle ' s speech act theory as anal yzing tool to make classification, comparation and analysis of the materials.