A Study Of The Interpretation Of Indirect Speech Acts

Speech Act Theory is founded by British philosopher J. Austin and developed by Austin's pupil, American philosopher and linguist J. Searle. Within the field of speech acts studies, a lot of attention has been devoted to the problem of interpretation of indirect speech acts. The question of how people comprehend indirect meanings is extremely important because we communicate with different people every day and indirect speech acts play an important role in them. Previous research offers a large body of fruitful ideas in acknowledging the role of the extra-linguistic and situational context in utterance interpretation. However, it doesn't systematically specify the kinds of inference patterns that are needed for interpretation of indirect speech acts, or how the mechanism involved is called up.In this thesis, a systematic and comprehensive study of indirect speech acts has been pursued primarily from a pragmatic and cognitive perspective. We have shown that the linguistic phenomena traditionally described only in terms of pragmatics can be explained insightfully by and integrated into a cognitive framework. Then the above deficiencies can be successfully overcome by the pragmatic-cognitive study under discussion.The study of indirect speech acts from a pragmatic perspective will inevitably involve such pragmatic principles as the Cooperative Principles, Searle's Indirect Speech Act Theory, Politeness Principles and Face Theory, etc.Cognitive linguistics believe that the shared knowledge and experienceof the world stored in the mind serve as some kind of context supporting our interpretation and understanding of indirect speech act. The schema, as an important knowledge structure is the basis for selective abduction and creative abduction of the indirect speech act. In this paper, we will study indirect speech acts by combining Speech Act Theory with cognitive schema, and demonstrate a cognitive processing mechanism: the Indirect Speech Act Schema.Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory presents a new approach to the study of human communication and is grounded in a general view of human cognition.More recently, Thoraburg & Panther combine cognitive semantics with pragmatics to build their Speech Act Metonymy Theory. This thesis demonstrates that much of pragmatic inferencing is metonymic in nature and indirect speech acts can be described in terms of metonymic models. In this paper we analyze the indirectness of language use in general and try to offer a forceful explanation for people's efficiency and effectiveness in processing indirect speech acts.The arrangements of this paper are as follows:Chapter One is a literature review on Speech Act Theory, which reviews the definition, classification, features, and some related terms of speech act from the points of view of various disciplines and schools. This serves as a foundation of further discussion of the following chapters. Chapter Two introduces some relevant theories which will help us to make a systematic study of indirect speech acts with theoretical foundations. Chapter Three conducts a profound study of indirect speech acts from a pragmatic perspective. Then a suggested model of an analysis for indirect speech acts which is based on atheory of speech acts (mainly the felicity conditions), certain general principles of cooperative conversation (some of Gricean theory of Cooperative Principle), Politeness Principles and Face Theory together with an ability on the addressee to make inferences, is developed. Chapter Four studies the indirect speech act from another perspective—cognitive linguistics. The indirect speech act is discussed with the Relevance Theory, Schema Theory and Speech Act Metonymy. The last is a conclusion of the thesis, which draws a summary of what has been discussed in the previous chapters.In a word, a comparable exhaustive study of, and an ideal approach to the indirect speech act is necessary. The organic combination of a pragmatic and cognitive approach to indirect speech act is possible and feasible. However, this approach is just a try, or a beginning. Considerable amount of further work has to be done to put the pragmatic-cognitive approach to the study of indirect speech acts into application.