Indirect Speech Act Schema

Following Searle's idea, speech act theorists assume that the identification of the intended (primary) communicative intention of an indirect speech act requires a certain amount of inferencing on the part of the hearer. More recently, Thornburg & Panther combine cognitive semantics with pragmatics to build their Speech Act Metonymy Theory. They have shown that linguistic phenomena traditionally described in terms of pragmatics can be explained insightfully by and integrated into a cognitive framework. They also demonstrate that much of pragmatic inferencing is metonymic in nature and believed that indirect speech acts can be described in terms of metonymic models. All the standard accounts highlight questions, which are of great interest, not only to the study of idioms, but also to the study of figurative language in general. In this paper we focus on the indirect speech acts and analyse the indirectness of language use in general. What interests us most is the fact that people usually arrive at the intended interpretation very quickly and without any noticeable effort, at least in the case of conventionalised indirect speech acts. Being inspired by the previous theories, we try to construct an indirect speech act schema (ISAS) and demonstrate such an ISAS system in attempt to offer aforceful explanation for people's efficiency and effectiveness in processing indirect speech acts.Individuals have knowledge schemata (units of knowledge) about everything they experience. Schemata become theories about reality, which not only affect the way information is interpreted but also continue to change as new information is received. We have schemata to represent knowledge about all levels of our experience, at all levels of abstraction-from ideologies and cultural truths to knowledge about the meaning of a particular word. All of our generic knowledge is embedded in schemata.In this paper, we will study indirect speech acts from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective by combining speech act theory with cognitive schema, and demonstrate a cognitive processing mechanism: the Indirect Speech Act Schema (ISAS). The ISAS works as a system with a large number of knowledge schemata. Such knowledge schemata are self-perfecting, which are formed and improved according to multiple factors such as the cognitive environment and life experience. The perfectness of their construction and the efficiency of their cooperation determine our competence in language use and social communication. The imperfect construction of necessary knowledge schemata will consequently creates difficulties in the process of communication; and the inefficient cooperation will then lead to different levels of communicative failure. Therefore the ISAS system is such a multi-dimensional network consists of all kinds of knowledge schemata that could utilize all our knowledge and lead us through the process. Such an ISAS system helps people to understand how different utterance forms can be the vehicles of different communicative intentions and thus enables people to correctly map utterance onto its intended interpretation.The paper begins with a brief introduction to the definition and previous research of indirect speech acts. Then the historical studies of indirect speech acts will be followed. In the third part, we put forward the hypothesis of indirect speech act schema, state its theoretical basis, and offer a description of the ISAS in general. Next is the classification and brief analysis of the ISAS. The last is case studies in comparison to previous approaches to test the assumptions put forward in previous parts.