Other approaches to the problem

3.3.     Other approaches to the problem

The difference of the idiomatic and inference approaches can be explained by different understanding of the role of convention in communication. The former theory overestimates it while the latter underestimates it, and both reject the qualitative diversity of conventionality. Correcting this shortcoming, Jerry Morgan writes about two types of convention in indirect speech acts [39, 261]: conventions of language and conventions of usage. The utterance “Can you pass the salt?” cannot be considered as a regular idiom (conventions of language), but its use for an indirect request is undoubtedly conventional, i.e. habitual for everyday speech that is always characterized by a certain degree of ritualization.

In accordance with this approach the function of an indirect speech act is conventionally fixed, and an inference process is not needed. Conventions of usage express what Morgan calls “short-circuited implicatures”: implicatures that once were motivated by explicit reasoning but which now do not have to be calculated explicitly anymore.

There is an opinion that indirect speech acts must be considered as language polysemy, e.g. “Why not + verb?” construction serves as a formal marker of not just the illocutive function of a question, but of that of a request, e.g. “Why not clean the room right now?”

According to Grice and Searle, the implicit meaning of an utterance can always be inferred from its literal meaning. But according to the relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson [46, 113], the process of interpretation of indirect speech acts does not at all differ from the process of interpretation of direct speech acts. Furthermore, it is literal utterances that are often marked and sound less natural than utterances with an indirect meaning. For example, the utterance “She is a snake.” having an implicit meaning sounds more natural than “She is spiteful.” Exclamatory utterances “It’s not exactly a picniс weather!” and “It’s not a day for cricket!” sound more expressive and habitual than the literal utterance “What nasty weather we are having!” The interrogative construction expressing a request “Could you put on your black dress?” is more customary than the performative: “I suggest that you should put on your black dress.”  

To summarize: there is no unanimity among linguists studying indirect speech acts as to how we discover them in each other’s speech and “extract” their meaning. Every theory has got its strong and weak points, and the final word has not yet been said.

4.  ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN

Speech act theories considered above treat an indirect speech act as the product of a single utterance based on a single sentence with only one illocutionary point - thus becoming a pragmatic extension to sentence grammars. In real life, however, we do not use isolated utterances: an utterance functions as part of a larger intention or plan. In most interactions, the interlocutors each have an agenda; and to carry out the plan, the illocutions within a discourse are ordered with respect to one another.  Very little work has been done on the contribution of the illocutions within utterances to the development of understanding of a discourse.

As Labov and Fanshel pointed out, “most utterances can be seen as performing several speech acts simultaneously ... Conversation is not a chain of utterances, but rather a matrix of utterances and actions bound together by a web of understandings and reactions ... In conversation, participants use language to interpret to each other the significance of the actual and potential events that surround them and to draw the consequences for their past and future actions.” (Labov, Fanshel 1977: 129).

Attempts to break out of the sentence-grammar mould were made by Labov and Fanshel [35], Edmondson [29], Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper [24]. Even an ordinary and rather formal dialogue between a customer and a chemist contains indirectness (see table 4.1).

 Table 4.1

Indirect speech acts of an ordinary formal dialogue

 Discourse always displays one or more perlocutionary functions. Social interaction predominates in everyday chitchat; informativeness in academic texts; persuasiveness in political speeches; and entertainment in novels. But many texts combine some or all these functions in varying degrees to achieve their communicational purpose. For instance, although an academic text is primarily informative, it also tries to persuade readers to reach a certain point of view; it needs to be entertaining enough to keep the reader's attention; and most academic texts try to get the reader on the author’s side through social interactive techniques such as use of authorial we to include the reader.

The genre of the text shapes the strategy for its interpretation: we do not expect nonliterality when reading medical prescriptions. For every genre there is an illocutionary standard. For example, a letter of recommendation is an alloy of declarations and expressives. A request added to it converts it into a petition whereas a detailed list of facts from the person’s life turns it into a biography. In canonized texts, lack of “moulds” has a significant pragmatic load.

The illocutionary standard of a text depends on the communicative situation and macrocontext. For example, in “The Centaur” by John Updike there is an obituary whose indirect meaning is much wider than the literal meaning (chapter 5 of the novel).

On the whole, the contribution of the illocutions of individual utterances to the understanding of macrostructures within texts is sorely in need of study.