A Corpus-based Study On Pragmaticalization Of The Illocutionary Construction

Indirect speech acts have been the interest of numerous linguists since speech acttheory was incepted in the20thcentury. Searle (1969) proposes the notion ofindirectness, and divides the indirect speech acts into conventional andnon-conventional ones. The two subtypes have clear boundaries in that the former oneperforms the specific illocutionary point conventionally, while the production andunderstanding of the latter one bear higher processing effort and inferential load. It isargued that the difference between literal meaning and utterance meaning exists in theproduction of indirect speech acts. Thus, how to distinguish the two kinds of meaningand infer the intention are really important issues. The persuasions from pragmatistsand cognitive linguists have not solved the issues systematically. They are in line withthe hypothesis of LFH (Literal Force Hypothesis) and overlook the prototypicalnature of illocutions.The study applies the theory of Illocutionary ICM (Idealized Cognitive Model) toinvestigate the features, pragmaticalization degree and processing mechanism ofillocutionary constructions. Firstly, the Illocutionary ICM roots in the weaker versionof LFH proposed by Rissalada (1993) which regards each illocutionary category canachieve various illocutionary points and they are prototypical and gradable in nature.Secondly, the study analyzes the ontology and structure of the speech acts ofsuggesting covering the semantic, pragmatic and conventional principles ofillocutions. Thirdly, the paper investigates the traditional conventional indirect speechacts from the perspective of illocutionary construction. It makes a case study tointerpret the structures and constructional nature of ‘Why don’t you VP?’ based on thedata collected from COCA. In addition, the cognitive mechanism and characteristicsduring the process of pragmaticalization are interpreted under the theory ofIllocutionary ICM.Therefore, this research discovers:(1) The illocutionary categories areprototypical in nature, and there are no clear cuts between the notions of directness and indirectness and conventionality and non-conventionality. The more speech actparameters are activated then a lower degree of indirectness and higher degree ofconventionality will be carried.(2) In terms of Illocutionary ICM, if the metonymicactivation focuses on the ontology part, the degree of conventionality is higher; whenthe source domain is closer to the peripheral part of the structure, the conventionalitydegree will gradually decrease.(3) The pragmaticalization of ‘Why don’t you VP?’has four characteristics: unidirectionality, graduality, gradability and subjectivization.During the process of pragmaticalization, it is determined by the activated parametersthat whether an illocutionary construction performs the literal meaning or theutterance meaning. The more parameters are activated and the closer to the central ofthe illocutionary category, the higher degree of pragmaticalization is. As a result, theliteral meaning gradually fades and the utterance meaning becomes prominent, andvice versa.