Indirect Speech Acts--From A Pragmatic And Cognitive Perspective

The present work attempts to apply recent theories from linguistics, cognitive science and pragmatics in particular, to study indirect speech acts. It aims to introduce a new way of understanding an indirect speech act between a speaker and an addressee. Mainly the mutual manifestness from Relevance Theory from the cognitive and pragmatic perspective is used to develop this understanding. Indirect speech acts is the illocutionary acts performed indirectly by way of performing another. That is the speaker utters a sentence, means what he says, but also means another illocution with a different prepositional content. Using indirect speech acts is a common linguistic phenomenon in the daily communication. But because of its indirectness, there sometimes will be misunderstanding between the speaker and the addressee. Many scholars have carried out researches on this phenomenon. The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else. And since meaning consists in part in the intention to produce understanding in the hearer, a large part of that problem is that of how it is possible for the hearer to understand the indirect speech act when the sentence he hears and understands means something else. The mutual manifestness from Relevance Theory helps to make correct understanding. This thesis will study this from cognitive and pragmatic perspective.In Chapter I, the definition of Indirect Speech Acts is introduced. Then, a suggested model of an analysis for indirect speech acts which isbased on a theory of speech acts (mainly the felicity conditions), certain general principles of cooperative conversation (some of Gricean theory of Cooperative Principle), and mutually shared factual background information of the speaker and the addressee (a part of Relevance Theory), together with an ability on the part of the addressee to make inferences, is developed. Later on, in Chapter III and Chapter IV, focused on the mutually shared factual background information of the speaker and the addressee from a part of Relevance Theory, the cognitive process and social contexts for understanding between the speaker and the addressee are mainly discussed. At last, an illustration in the understanding of one instance of indirect directive speech act is explained. In a word, the present paper is trying to study Indirect Speech Acts from a cognitive and a pragmatic perspective, concluding that mutually shared factual background information of the speaker and the addressee from Relevance Theory plays an important role in the process of understanding Indirect Speech Acts.