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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.

3. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN

A DISCOURSE

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

|Participant |Utterance |Indirect speech acts |
|Customer |Do you have any | Seeks to establish preparatory |
| |Actifed? |condition for |
| | |transaction and thereby implies the |
| | |intention to |
| | |buy on condition that Actifed is |
| | |available. |
|Chemist |Tablets or | Establishes a preparatory |
| |linctus? |condition for the |
| | |transaction by offering a choice of |
| | |product. |
|Customer |Packet of | Requests one of products offered,|
| |tablets, |initiates |
| |please. |transaction. In this context, even |
| | |without |
| | |“please”, the noun phrase alone will |
| | |function as |
| | |a requestive. |
|Chemist |That'll be | A statement disguising a request |
| |$18.50. |for payment to |
| | |execute the transaction. |
|Customer |OK. | Agrees to contract of sale thereby|
| | |fulfilling |
| | |t buyer's side of the bargain. |
|Chemist |Have a nice day! | Fulfills seller's side of the |
| | |bargain and |
| | |concludes interaction with a |
| | |conventional farewell. |

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.

4. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN

Pragmatic research reveals that the main types of speech acts can be found in all natural languages. Yet, some speech acts are specific for a group of languages or even for a certain language. For instance, the English question “Have you got a match?” is a request while the Ukrainian utterance “Чи маєте Ви сірники?” possesses two meanings: either the speaker is asking you for matches or offering them to you. Only the utterance “У
Вас немає сірників?” having interrogatory intonation and stressed “немає” is unambiguously a request.

Offering advice, the Ukrainians prefer not to use modal verbs (могти, хотіти) that would make up an indirect speech act.
Preference is given to direct speech acts of advice.

Seeing off guests, the Ukrainians often use causative verbs, e.g. “Заходіть! Телефонуйте! Пишіть!” This communicative behaviour often provokes an inadequate reaction of foreigners: instead of “Дякую!” prescribed by the Ukrainian speech etiquette they say: “With great pleasure!” or ask “When exactly should I come? What for?”

Mikhail Goldenkov describes a typical indirect speech act used in US public transport [3,82]. If a passenger wants to get off a crowded bus, s/he should not directly question the passengers blocking the way if they are getting off or not (like it is usually done in Ukraine). A direct speech act would be taken as meddling in other people’s personal matters. A request to make way must be disguised as a statement: “Excuse me,
I am getting off” or as a question in the first person: “Could I get off please?”

Indirect speech acts must always be taken into account when learning a foreign language. In many cases they make the communicative center and sound much more natural than direct speech acts. In particular, at English lessons in Ukraine much attention is given to direct inverted questions. Furthermore, often only such questions are considered to be correct, and as a result students get accustomed to conversations reminding a police quest: “Have you got an apartment?”, “Where does your father work?”, etc. However, when asking for information, native speakers do not often use direct speech acts because they are not suitable from the point of view of speech etiquette. To master the art of conversation, students must be able to use indirect declarative questions, e.g. “I’d like to know if you are interested in football” or “I wonder if we could be pen-pals”, etc.

Native English speakers often say that English-speaking
Ukrainians sound too direct. As a result, the hearer feels pressure that can cause a communication failure. I remember my husband selecting books to borrow in a public library of
Montreal, Canada. He put aside the books he chose and left them unattended for a minute to go to another bookshelf. Meanwhile another reader came by and took some of my husband’s books.
Seeing that, my husband came up to the man and said: “Please put the books back”. The man looked offended. Definitely, he did not expect a direct speech act. He took it as a command threatening his “negative face”. My husband made a communicational mistake.
An indirect speech act was the only thing appropriate in the situation. He should have said something like “Excuse me, but I am borrowing those books.” It would have been a request disguised as a statement.

English lessons for the Ukrainians must include Tips for making English less direct, i.e. special information on how to
“soften” directness of speech using indirect speech acts, for example: “Try to present your view as a question, not as a statement. Say: “Wouldn’t that be too late?” instead of “That will be too late.”

5. EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN MODERN ENGLISH DISCOURSE

1. Fiction

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