Chapter 5. The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Theory Of Language

scholarly journals Communicative Approach in Teaching Foreign Languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 359-365
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Actual Performance ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Distribution Shifts

The Communitive Approach in language teaching starts from а theory of language as communication. The goal of language teaching is to develop communicative competence. Another linguistic theory of communication favored in CLT is functional account of language use. Linguistic is concerned with the description of speech acts of texts, since only through study of language in use are all the functions of language and therefore all components of meaning brought into focus. The goal of language teaching is to develop what referred to as “communicative competence”. This term is coined in order to contrast а communicative view of language and theory of competence. Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in а completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitation, distribution, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.

scholarly journals Contrastive Pragmatics: Apologies & Thanks in English and Italian

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Cuneyt Demir ◽  
Mehmet Takkac
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
American English ◽  
The Status ◽  
Language Competency ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Remedial Strategies

<p>Awareness of language or language competency has greatly changed from the focus of language itself as form and structure to language use as pragmatics. Accordingly, it is widely accepted that different cultures structure discourse in different ways. Moreover, studies have shown that this holds for discourse genres traditionally considered as highly standardized in their rituals and formulas. Taking inspiration from such studies, this paper employs a corpus-based approach to examine variations of the apology and thanking strategies used in English and Italian. First the apology itself as a form of social action is closely analyzed and then thanking. This study also pays special attention on analyzing and contrasting apology and thanking strategies in American English and in Italian in terms of Marion Owen’s remedial strategies (Owen, 1983), and Olshtain &amp; Cohen’s semantic formulas in the apology speech act set (Olshtain &amp; Cohen, 1983). The purpose of the study is not only to compare apology and thanking speech acts but to also learn their contextual use. The findings suggest that the status and role of the situation affect the speakers’ choice of apology and thanking strategies, and semantic formulas are of great importance.</p>

scholarly journals Polite speech emerges from competing social goals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica J. Yoon ◽  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Michael Henry Tessler ◽  
Noah D. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Probabilistic Model ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Social Goals ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Full Model ◽  
Efficient Tool ◽  
Social Language ◽  
Quantitative Accuracy ◽  
Polite Speech

Language is a remarkably efficient tool for transmitting information. Yet human speakers make statements that are inefficient, imprecise, or even contrary to their own beliefs, all in the service of being polite. What rational machinery underlies polite language use? Here, we show that polite speech emerges from the competition of three communicative goals: to convey information, to be kind, and to present oneself in a good light. We formalize this goal tradeoff using a probabilistic model of utterance production, which predicts human utterance choices in socially-sensitive situations with high quantitative accuracy, and we show that our full model is superior to its variants with subsets of the three goals. This utility-theoretic approach to speech acts takes a step towards explaining the richness and subtlety of social language use.

scholarly journals Speech Acts

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Recursive Structures ◽  
Core Language ◽  
Core Issues ◽  
Essential Insight

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation.

Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Istvan Kecskes
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
First Languages ◽  
Intercultural Pragmatics ◽  
Intercultural Interactions ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

This chapter discusses the differences between cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics. While cross-cultural pragmatics compares different cultures, based on the investigation of certain aspects of language use, such as speech acts, behaviour patterns, and language behaviour, intercultural pragmatics focuses on intercultural interactions and investigates the nature of the communicative process among people from different cultures, speaking different first languages. Cross-cultural pragmatics analyses the differences and similarities in the language behaviour of people representing different languages and cultures. Intercultural pragmatics, however—a relatively new discipline—is interested in what happens when representatives of different first languages and cultures communicate using a common language.

REQUESTING SPEECH ACT OF UTTERANCES IN OCEAN’S ELEVEN BY STEVEN SODERBERGH: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 410
Author(s):  
Nurul Hasanah ◽  
Japen Sarage
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
The Real ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Actual Use

The term sentence and utterance are made different in terms that the former refers to syntactic structure, while the latter points out the actual function of such a structure in real communication. The same things apply to the terms request and requesting. The first term suggests the structural characteristics of sentence asking people to do something while the second term indicates the real sentence causing people to do something. The first deals with formal grammar while the second deals with pragmatics the actual use of language in communication.This article attempts to see requesting in its possible different syntactic forms as parts of speech acts in Ocean’sEleven by Steven Soderbergh. A pragmatic approach is applied since it uses context as a part of linguistic analysis involving the speaker, addressee, time, location, and genre in the conversation. A syntactic form of a sentence only cannot represent the real meaning of intention.The analysis of speech act of the conversation in the film brings us to an understanding that pragmatics encourage us to comprehend different kinds of setting to achieve requesting as a part of language use. Pragmatics as a branch of linguistics reveals mutual understanding between the speaker and the hearer.

scholarly journals REQUESTIVE UTTERANCES IN SPOKEN JAVANESE OF TEGAL

HUMANIKA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Mualimin Mualimin ◽  
Marsono Marsono ◽  
Suhandano Suhandano
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The World ◽  
Radio Programs ◽  
Imperative Mood ◽  
Local Languages ◽  
Research Show

Studying  language use as a part of the culture has been carried out for many years in many parts of the world, including in Indonesia. Indonesia which has various cultures has hundreds of local languages in which one of them is Javanese spoken in Tegal. This study is aimed at exploring how the Javanese dialect spoken in Tegal is used in drama radio programs on Pertiwi Radio of Slawi, the capital city of Tegal Regency.The data of the research are in the forms of uttrerances spoken by the characters of the drama containing requestive speech acts using a sociopragmatic approach. The findings of the research show that requestive utterances found in the drama are expressed both directly and indirectly. The direct requestive speech acts are mostly conveyed in utterances with imperative mood,  while indirect requestive ones are in the forms of declarative and interrogative utterances. The choice of utterances is influenced by context of social factors where the language is used and is related to request strategy.

Idiomaticity and functional variation: A case study of international amateur radio talk

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dafydd Gibbon
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Functional Variation ◽  
Language Form ◽  
Amateur Radio ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Radio Talk

The linguistic domain of idiomaticity poses many problems for the study of language form, use, and variation. With selected aspects of idiomaticity as a starting point, I will attempt in this paper to develop a description of the use of idioms as a segment of a more general theory of language use. Evidence for this approach is drawn from international amateur radio talk (IART) in English.

Typology and the future of Cognitive Linguistics

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Croft
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Individual Speaker

AbstractThe relationship between typology and Cognitive Linguistics was first posed in the 1980s, in terms of the relationship between Greenbergian universals and the knowledge of the individual speaker. An answer to this question emerges from understanding the role of linguistic variation in language, from occasions of language use to typological diversity. This in turn requires the contribution of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary historical linguistics as well as typology and Cognitive Linguistics. While Cognitive Linguistics is part of this enterprise, a theory of language that integrates all of these approaches is necessary.

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