Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts


Book Description

"The work of Bach and Harnish represents an able attempt by a philosopher and a linguist respectively to restore some sorely needed naturalistic assumptions to the study of linguistic communication."







Speech Act Theory and Communication


Book Description

Speech Act Theory: A Univen Study was undertaken to investigate the pragmatic value of the utterances of selected students at the University of Venda, South Africa. Utterances of second-language users of a language reflect the wealth of their language experiences and hence caution has to be exercised when conducting an investigation into such utterances. It is within this background that this investigation was conducted into the meaning-creation strategies and abilities of the participants in this study. The very idiocyncratic utterances investigated demonstrated vividly the multi-dimensional thought process exploited by the creators of these samples. Also demonstrated by the analyses is the nature of communication and the amount of linguistic interaction necessary for interlocutors to create meaning.




Speech Acts Across Cultures


Book Description

This book investigates the notion of Speech Act from a cross-cultural perspective. The starting point for this book is the assumption that speech acts are realized from culture to culture in different ways and that these differences may result in communication difficulties that range from the humorous to the serious. Importantly, a recurring theme in this volume has to do with the need to verify the form, the function and the constraining variables of speech acts as a prerequisite for dealing with them in the classroom. The book deals with three major areas of Speech Act research: 1) Methodological Issues, 2) Speech Acts in a second language, and 3) Applications. In the first section authors discuss general issues of methodology and present data in an effort to detail the efficacy of different methodologies. Research clearly shows the effect of methodology on the results. This section is followed by a discussion of specific speech acts, including speech acts and strategy use that have as their goal the creation and maintenace of solidarity (i.e. greetings, compliments, apologies) and speech acts that involve face-threatening acts (i.e.complaints, favor-asking, suggestions). In the final section, authors consider applications of speech act research within the context of advertising and business relationships.




Speech Act Performance


Book Description

Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters. Considering these concerns, the aim of this volume is two-fold: to deal with those theoretical approaches that inform the process of learning speech acts in particular contextual and cultural settings; and, secondly, to present a variety of methodological proposals, grounded on research-based ideas, for the teaching of the major speech acts in second/foreign language classrooms. This volume is a valuable theoretical and practical resource not only for researchers, teachers and students interested in speech act learning/teaching but also for textbook writers wishing to have an informed opinion on the pedagogical implications derived from research on speech act performance.




Speech Acts


Book Description

'This small but tightly packed volume is easily the most substantial discussion of speech acts since John Austin's How To Do Things With Words and one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of language in recent decades.'--Philosophical Quarterly




John Searle's Philosophy of Language


Book Description

This is a volume of original essays on key aspects of John Searle's philosophy of language. It examines Searle's work in relation to current issues of central significance, including internalism versus externalism about mental and linguistic content, truth-conditional versus non-truth-conditional conceptions of content, the relative priorities of thought and language in the explanation of intentionality, the status of the distinction between force and sense in the theory of meaning, the issue of meaning scepticism in relation to rule-following, and the proper characterization of 'what is said' in relation to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Written by a distinguished team of contemporary philosophers, and prefaced by an illuminating essay by Searle, the volume aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle's work in philosophy of language, and to suggest innovative approaches to fundamental questions in that area.




New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics


Book Description

New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics brings together varying perspectives in second language (L2) pragmatics to show both historical developments in the field, while also looking towards the future, including theoretical, empirical, and implementation perspectives. This volume is divided in four sections: teaching and learning speech acts, assessing pragmatic competence, analyzing discourses in digital contexts, and current issues in L2 pragmatics. The chapters focus on various aspects related to the learning, teaching, and assessing of L2 pragmatics and cover a range of learning environments. The authors address current topics in L2 pragmatics such as: speech acts from a discursive perspective; pragmatics instruction in the foreign language classroom and during study abroad; assessment of pragmatic competence; research methods used to collect pragmatics data; pragmatics in computer-mediated contexts; the role of implicit and explicit knowledge; discourse markers as a resource for interaction; and the framework of translingual practice. Taken together, the chapters in this volume foreground innovations and new directions in the field of L2 pragmatics while, at the same time, ground their work in the existing literature. Consequently, this volume both highlights where the field of L2 pragmatics has been and offers cutting-edge insights into where it is going in the future.




Speech Acts and Politeness Across Languages and Cultures


Book Description

Speech Acts and Politeness are among the main areas of interest in pragmatics. These communicative phenomena can be considered universal and at the same time language and culture-specific. It is this latter dimension that has been at the centre of recent developments in pragmatics, and it is also the focus of this book. The aim of this book is to reflect this development, providing evidence from four main areas crucial to pragmatics across languages and cultures: a description of a variety of speech acts and politeness strategies in different languages and cultures, a cross-cultural comparison of several speech acts and patterns of politeness, an in-depth analysis of issues concerning the learning and teaching of speech acts and politeness in second/foreign languages, as well as some methodological resources in pragmatics. This book is intended for researchers, scholars and students interested in the field of pragmatics, in general, or in the fields of cross-cultural and second/foreign language pragmatics, and specifically for those interested in speech acts and politeness. It will also be useful to any scholar interested in how communication and culture are related.




Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics


Book Description

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.