On A Dialogical Understanding Of Non-conventional ISA From The Angle Of Speaker And Hearer

Linguists like Austin and Searle made great contribution to the Speech Act Theory. They pointed out that language can not only tell us something but also do something. Namely language relates to acts, to say something is to do something. They also suggested language is inconsistent with acts and had divided speech acts into several categories. Modern linguists criticized that division. They hold the division is too subjective and it neglects why the linguistic phenomenon exists and how it can be understood, which is what I focus on in this paper. That's why I try to explain the dialogical understanding of Non-conventional Indirect Speech Acts from the angle of speaker and hearer.Speech act is the smallest unit in the process of communication, and the components of bigger units of communicative structure. In practical communication, people usually deliberately intend to perform speech acts indirectly. That's to say, people convey their intention and ideas in an indirect way or beat about the bush just due to politeness or in order to avoid embarrassment. Then another more important linguistic phenomenon-Indirect Speech Act comes into our sight, which of course has aroused intensive study and discussion of many famous linguists. They made great contribution to the proposition and development of the theory successively and made it perfect and more mature. Apart from DSA(direct speech act), the main features of ISA( indirect speech act), as the most common and important speech act, are non-correspondence of the form and function of language and inconsistency of literal meaning and illocutionary meaning. And according to Searle, ISA can further be divided into two groups: conventional indirect speech act and non-conventional indirect speech act, between which non-conventional ISA with its complexity, unstableness and distinctive inference is more worthy of our study and discussion. From the angle of S(speaker) and H (hearer) , this paper is engaged in analyzing non-conventional ISA systematically and furthermore shed light on the certain regularity of non-conventional ISA. It is evident that the understanding process of ISA is the process of S's encoding and H's decoding or inference. They cooperate with each other and cause ISA communication to go smooth and successful. The writer studies and discusses the linguistic phenomenon and explains the profound theory in a somewhat simple way. In the dynamic communicative context, on the premise of the optimal relevance, S's encoding has the selectivity of high degree. S needs to select certain linguistic symbols to activate the conceptual structure of H subjectively and click briefly, like dragonflies skimming over the water, on the conceptual network of H. The process of S's encoding is not like the act of setting the tune with one beat of the gong and it is not irreversible but adjustable or adaptable. In ISA there are four factors determining the degree of indirectness of S's encoding. They are social power between S and H; social distance between S and H; size of imposition of the acts of S and H in specific culture; the relative rights and obligations between S an H. And the process of H's decoding is to do some make-up and make some improvement to the context so as to recognize the illocutionary force of the speech after obtaining the optimal relevance through combining the best context.