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INTRODUCTION

“A great deal can be said in the study of

language without studying speech acts,

but any such purely formal theory is

necessarily incomplete. It would be as if

baseball were studied only as a formal

system of rules and not as a game.”

John Rogers Searle

In the late 1950s, the Oxford philosopher John Austin gave some lectures on how speakers “do things with words” and so invented a theory of “speech acts” [10, 40] which now occupies the central place in pragmatics (pragmatics is the study of how we use language to communicate in a particular context). Austin highlighted the initial contrast between the constative and the performative. While constatives describe a state of affairs, performatives (explicit and implicit) have the potential to bring about a change in some state of affairs. Classical examples of performatives include the naming of a ship, the joining of two persons in marriage, and the sentencing of a criminal by an authorised person. Austin distinguished between the locution of a speech act (the words uttered), its illocution (the intention of the speaker in making the utterance) and its perlocution (its effects, intended or otherwise). Whereas constatives typically have truth conditions to comply with, speech acts must satisfy certain “felicity conditions” in order to count as an action: there must be a conventional procedure; the circumstances and people must be appropriate; the procedure must be executed correctly and completely; often, the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings, etc.

John Austin’s theory of speech acts was generalized to cover all utterances by a student of Austin's, John Rogers Searle
[43, 69]. Searle showed that we perform speech acts every time we speak. For example, asking “What's the time?” we are performing the speech act of making a request. Turning an erstwhile constative into an explicit performative looks like this: “It is now ten o’clock” means “I hereby pronounce that it is ten o’ clock in the morning.”

In such a situation, the original constative versus performative distinction becomes untenable: all speech is performative. The important distinction is not between the performative and the constative, but between the different kinds of speech acts being performed, that is between direct and indirect speech acts. Searle's hypothesis was that in indirect speech acts, the speaker communicates the non-literal as well as the literal meaning to the hearer. This new pragmatic trend was named intentionalism because it takes into account the initial intention of the speaker and its interpretation by the hearer.

Actuality of research:

The problem of indirect speech acts has got a great theoretical meaning for analysis of the form/function relation in language: the same form performs more than one function. To generate an indirect speech act, the speaker has to use qualitatively different types of knowledge, both linguistic and extralinguistic (interactive and encyclopaedic), as well as the ability to reason [45, 97]. A number of theories try to explain why we make indirect speech acts and how we understand their non- literal meaning, but the research is still far from being complete.

The practical value of research lies in the fact that it is impossible to reach a high level of linguistic competence without understanding the nature of indirect speech acts and knowing typical indirect speech acts of a particular language.

The tasks of research: analysis of the theories on indirect speech acts; finding out why interlocutors generate indirect speech acts instead of saying exactly what they mean; comparing typical indirect speech acts in English and in
Ukrainian; providing examples of indirect speech acts in various communicational situations.

The object of research is a speech act as a communicational action that speakers perform by saying things in a certain way in a certain context.

The subject of research is an indirect speech act as the main way in which the semantic content of a sentence can fail to determine the full force and content of the illocutionary act being performed in using the sentence.

Methods of research include critical analysis of scientific works on the subject, analysis of speech of native English speakers in various communicational situations, analysis of speech behavior of literary personages created by modern British and American writers.

INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION

“Communication is successful not when

hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the

utterance, but when they infer the speaker's

meaning from it.”

Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson

Most of what human beings say is aimed at success of perlocutionary acts, but because perlocutionary effects are behavioural, cognitive, or emotional responses they are not linguistic objects. What linguists can properly look at, however, are the intentions of speakers to bring about certain perlocutionary effects which are called illocutionary intentions.

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