Indirect speech acts and intonation

Abstract

This thesis began as an English-based study of indirect speech acts. Taking the current literature as its starting point, particularly the work of Searle and Wierzbicka, it set out to further investigate and to try to formalize the processes by which everyday speech acts can be manifested via a number of different 'indirect' forms. In particular, this meant carefully relating utterances to the felicity conditions on different speech acts, or relating surface forms to illocutionary structures. I hoped to account for a wider variety of 'indirect' forms, correlated to a much greater range of speech acts than has commonly been discussed in the literature. It was anticipated that similarities and differences between speech acts would become clearer in the course of the study and that certain principles of 'indirection' would become more evident. A good deal of detailed work was in fact carried out along these lines. This was greatly assisted by the availability of a relatively simple means of semantic representation developed by Anna Wierzbicka using natural language primitives and near-primitives. Furthermore, by developing a more detailed analysis of certain speech acts it was possible to fruitfully investigate the behaviour of certain aspects of English syntax which h ave proved rather intractable to analysis: viz. tagged clauses (particularly interrogative tags), certain features of topic-comment relationships, and certain aspects of negation (in particular 'perforrnative negation'). However, a weakness in all this analysis, which it b e came increasingly obvious was of major importance, concerned the role played by intonation as an indicator of illocutionary force. While a few writers occasionally make token reference to the importance of intqnation in speech act analysis, the analysis per se is almost invariably carried out in an intonational vacuum. The further my own work proceeded, the more obvious it became that lack of attention to intonation was a maJor shortcoming. What was worse, there did not appear to be any readily agreed upon method of representing intonation, let alone one developed with the intention of representing significant semantic (rather than more narrowly conceived phonetic) distinctions. It seemed that a serious study of indirect speech acts had to make a much more concerted effort to tackle this problem. Chapter 2 of this thesis is the result of my own work in this area; it draws primarily upon prev ious work by Halliday , Bolinger and Crystal. The chapter is essentially self- contained, and presents a detailed, coherent and comprehensive method of representing intonation in· English, with the need to make important semantic distinctions the primary aim. Because of a variety of conflicting viewpoints regarding the nature and function of intonation , the best means of analysing it in detail and of representing it, at certain points I have had to argue in some detail for the analysis adopted. Some interesting conclusions regarding formal and functional overlap of English 'tones' and the interaction between certain 'head' and ' nucleus' ('tone') profiles emerge in the course of the analysis. Armed with this intonational background I was then able to begin work again in earnest on the original project. Unfortunately, considerations of time and space began to exert a dampening influence on the enterprise: the study being a partial Master's thesis with a set deadline. There was not enough time to thoroughly apply the intonational lessons I had learnt to the detailed analysis of speech acts which I had already mapped out. So I have written chapter 1 as a more or less self-contained study of the process (or rather, the processes) of 'indirection' applicable to speech acts. The chapter develops a number of important principles for speech act analysis and at the same time provides a critical dis cus sion of the approaches taken by others working in the area. I have included detailed analyses of some 16 speech acts in order to provide a sol id basis for the theoretical discussion. The importance of intonation become s abundantly clear in the course of the chapter. This thesis should really be complemented by two further chapters in accordance with the work already mentioned, which is about three quarters completed. "Chapter 3" would then be a detailed study of some fifty additional speech acts, the relationships between them, and other issues such as politeness and relationships to pragmatics involved in their use. And "chapter 4" would then be a detailed extension of speech act analysis into the three areas mentioned above which linguistics has not accounted for satisfactorily to date, i.e. tags (particularly interrogative tags), topic-conunent relationships, and different types of negation (particularly 'performative negation'). None of these three general 'problems' can be properly solved unless close attention is paid to intonation. In each case, but particularly with tags I think, an illocutionary analysis allows a coherent and unified analysis of a variety of structures which linguists have hitherto analysed in rather disparate and ad hoc ways. This thesis should be viewed, then, as a report on work in progress, rather than as a study (of the type favoured by some linguists) which provides neat solutions to neatly, but narrowly, formulated problems. The real conclusions to the investigation lie at the end of the 'phantom' chapters and beyond. For those unhappy without neat conclusions I can offer the following three key points in relation to the work presented in the two chapters of this thesis: (1) Intonation (meant in the broad sense, rather than the narrow sense of pitch movemen~, is an extremely important indicator of illocutionary force, which no a equate analysis of speech acts (whatever its theoretical starting point or lack thereof) can afford to ignore. (2) There are four distinct types of process commonly r eferred to in the literature as 'indirect' speech acts. Unless these are carefully distinguished speech act analysis runs the risk of becoming very confused. (3) Much of the linguistic analysis of speech acts to date has been unsatisfactory because of an inbuilt syntactic bias. This has led to an obsessive interest in 'performative' verbs and to a consistent tendency to call even the most commonly used utterances which count as performing a given speech act "indirect". I argue that this is a consequence of the failure to account for intonation as an inevitable part of the process of linguistic signification. Much linguistic speech act analysis has also been semantically careless, or quite indifferent to semantics. This has led at times to the unmotivated postulation of bizarre semantic structures for certain speech acts, or else to a tendency to give up on semantics and assume that all illocutionary meaning is situationally specific, or 'pragmatic'. Finally, it is worth making explicit my general attitude on the relationship between speech act analysis and linguistics. Speech acts occupy a borderline territory between language and social interaction. Insofar as they are part of language, knowledge of a basic set of speech acts is a part of general linguistic competence. Linguistic theory has not paid nearly enough attention to this issue. What analysis there has been has not been careful or penetrating enough, probably leading to a situation where at present speech acts tend to be assigned to a vague territory termed ' pragmatics'. This is only strictly true to the extent that speech acts are a regularly used component of general social interaction. The inferential processes which belong to pragmatics clearly operate on and around a corpus of more or less standard speech act structures in a given language. This corpus is understood and used by speakers of the language as a normal part of their day to day social interaction. Speech act structures can, therefore, be regarded as an important influence acting on linguistic form as a whole.