scholarly journals Asking and answering: A contrastive study of English and Swedish basic communication verbs

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 180-212
Author(s):  
Åke Viberg
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Conceptual Network ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

This article presents a contrastive study of the English verbs ask and answer and their Swedish correspondents based on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC), which is bi-directional and contains Swedish and English original texts and their corresponding translations. As a background, a short overview is given of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in general with brief discussions of speech act theory (Searle), direct and reported speech and conceptual frames (FrameNet) and their syntactic realizations. The contrastive study is concerned with networks of polysemy and the relationships of various senses with differing syntactic realizations across languages. The senses of ask are primarily distributed between two verbs in Swedish: fråga ‘ask a question’ and be ‘request (politely)’ but even some verbs with more specific meanings are involved. The concept of answering forms a conceptual network which is similar in English and Swedish but contrasts with respect to the way meanings are divided up between various verbs. English has a number of verbs such as answer, reply, respond, correspond, retort and rejoin, whereas Swedish to a great extent relies on one verb (svara) and its morphological derivations: besvara, ansvara, motsvara, försvara. In the Conclusion, pedagogical applications of the study are briefly discussed.

scholarly journals Finding a model for contrastive lexical semantics: A look at verbal communication verbs

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 195-215
Author(s):  
Åke Viberg
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Decompositional Analysis

A basic problem for contrastive lexical studies in general is to find a model for the semantic analysis. This paper is one in a series of corpus-based contrastive studies of the field of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in English and Swedish. Searle’s classification of speech acts serves as an important starting point but is not directly concerned with lexical structure, which is a major concern for the two theories that are compared in this study. FrameNet based on Fillmore’s theory of semantic frames and Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives (or “primes”). The theories are applied and tested on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) containing English and Swedish original texts together with their translations into the other language. Primarily two groups of English verbs and their Swedish correspondents will be analyzed: (1) Information verbs such as tell, inform, notify, report, narrate and describe and (2) Speech activity verbs such as talk, speak, chat, converse, gossip, discuss, debate, negotiate and bargain. There is also an analysis of Swedish berätta ‘tell, narrate’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC) as an example of multilingual contrastive analysis. Frames relate in a clear way the conceptual structure and the syntactic argument structure, which is very useful in a contrastive study. However, the definition of the meaning of individual verbs is incomplete and needs to be complemented with some kind of decompositional analysis such as the theory of semantic primes. A special section is devoted to an analysis of a large number of compound and derived forms of the Swedish verb tala ‘speak’ and a discussion of how contrasts in morphological structure can affect the lexical contrasts between two languages.

scholarly journals A Pragma-Stylistic Study of Some Selected Fantasy Novels

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 516
Author(s):  
Dunya Muhammed Miqdad I'jam ◽  
Zahraa Kareem Ghannam Farhan Al-Mamouri
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Conversational Implicature ◽  
Fantasy Novels ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Way

The present study tries to investigate the field of pragma-stylistics in literary text in general, and fantasy novels in particular. Therefore, it tries to attest how pragmatic theories are employed stylistically to achieve the aims of the literary writers and to reflect their perceptions. The present study tries to achieve the following aims: Specifying the most dominant categories of speech acts used by characters and the narrator in the two novels to achieve some stylistic effects. Showing how the non-observance of the maxim yield effects on the two levels of interaction, and presenting the most dominant non-observed maxim in the selected fantasy novels. Clarifying the way the difference in the writing period of each novel can affect the readers pragmatically and stylistically through finding out what is the most dominant figure of speech at the character-character level as well as the narrator-reader level of interaction and whether they are employed stylistically or not. The present study is limited to two theories of pragmatics: speech act theory and Grice maxims. And the data of the analysis is limited to the children’s fantasy novels, one is written in the 1950’s, the other in 2000’s. After analysing the data, it is concluded that the most dominant SA that is used is the representative SA. Flouting the maxims yield effects on the two levels of interaction, generating conversational implicature. Finally, the difference in the writing period of each novel affect the readers pragmatically and stylistically through finding out the most dominant figure of speech, which is irony, at the character-character and the narrator-reader level of interaction.

Kafka's Rhetorical Moment

PMLA ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton Koelb
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
De Man ◽  
The Way

Much of Kafka's fiction exploits language whose performative status is ambiguous–language that Paul de Man calls “rhetorical”–to generate a peculiar and characteristic narrative “space” in which Kafka's stories operate. Speech-act theory helps to clarify the way in which problems arising from language become the central problems that Kafka's characters face. In particular, the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions provides an analytic tool that reveals Kafka's abiding concern with the “gap,” or “aporia,” produced by assertions, requests, commands, and other illocutionary acts that turn out not to assert, request, or command anything the reader or listener can pin down. This tool helps us discover the linguistic sources for the bewilderment and anxiety that characterize Kafka's fictional world.

Communication And Speech Act Theory : A Contextual Study Of Language

2016 ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Makhlouf Abdelkader ◽  
Driss Mohamed Amine
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Contextual Study

New Work on Speech Acts

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
New Work ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship

The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.

God’s liturgical activity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
The People ◽  
Ancient Times

It is typical of Christian liturgical enactments for the people to pray and take for granted that God will act in the course of the enactment. This chapter first identifies and analyzes a number of ways in which God might act liturgically and then discusses at some length what might be meant when the people say, in response to the reading of Scripture, “This is the word of the Lord.” After suggesting that what might be meant is either that the reading presented what God said in ancient times or that, by way of the reading, God speaks anew here and now, the chapter suggests a third possibility by going beyond speech-act theory to introduce the idea of a continuant illocution in distinction from an occurrent illocution. Perhaps the reference is to one of God’s continuant illocutions.

Sentence mood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Portner
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Major Topic

Sentence mood is the linguistic category which marks the fundamental conversational function, or “sentential force,” of a sentence. Exemplified by the universal types of declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences (as well as by less-common types), sentence mood has been a major topic of research in both linguistics and philosophy. This chapter identifies the two main theories which address the topic, one based on speech act theory and the other on dynamic approaches to meaning. It explains and evaluates current research which uses the two theories, and identifies the most important insights which come out of each.

Sexual Harassment, Speech Acts, and Public Secrets in U.S. Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Debenport
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Online Conversations ◽  
Survey Responses ◽  
Discursive Representations

This chapter draws on data from U.S. higher education to analyze the ways that the language used to describe sexual harassment secures its continued power. Focusing on two features viewed as definitional to sexual harassment, frequency and severity, the discussion analyzes three sets of online conversations about the disclosure of abuse in academia (a series of tweets, survey responses, and posts on a philosophy blog) from grammatical, pragmatic, and semiotic perspectives. Unlike most prior research, this chapter focuses on the language of victims rather than the intentions of harassers. The results suggest that speech act theory is unable to account fully for sexual harassment without accepting the relevance of perlocutionary effects. Using Gal and Irvine’s (2019) model of axes of differentiation, the chapter demonstrates how opposing discursive representations (of professors, sexual harassers, victims, and accusers) create a discursive space in which it becomes difficult for victims to report their harassers.

scholarly journals Uttering geographies: Speech acts, felicity conditions and modes of existence

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1124-1140
Author(s):  
Miles Ogborn
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Human Speech ◽  
Everyday Talk ◽  
Modes Of Existence

The geographies of speech has become stuck in a form of interpretation which considers the potentially infinite detail of spoken performances understood within their equally infinitely complex contexts. This paper offers a way forward by considering the uses, critiques and reworkings of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory by those who study everyday talk, by deconstructionists and critical theorists, and by Bruno Latour in his AIME (‘An Inquiry into Modes of Existence’) project. This offers a rethinking of speech acts in terms of power and space, and a series of ontological differentiations between forms of utterances and enunciations beyond human speech.

Religious Language after J. L. Austin

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
James M. Smith ◽  
James WM. Mcclendon
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Linguistic Action ◽  
The Way

John L. Austin believed that in the illocution he had discovered a fundamental element of our speech, the understanding of which would disclose the significance of all kinds of linguistic action: not only proposing marriage and finding guilt, but also stating, reporting, conjecturing, and all the rest of the things men can do linguistically.2 We claim that the illocution, the full-fledged speech-act, is central to religious utterances as well, and that it provides a perspicuity in understanding them not elsewhere provided in the work of recent philosophy of religion. In particular we hold that understanding religious talk through the illocution shows the way in which the representative and affective elements are connected to one another and to the utterance as a whole. There may, further, be features in such an analysis which can be extended to other forms of discourse than religious.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document