Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA. Salvatore Attardo
that define a prototypical, idealized speech act, using the example of “promise.” The analysis is painstaking, but worth considering in detail, if one wants to understand how speech acts actually work. It consists of several felicity conditions, starting with the assumption that the speaker is making the promise to the hearer:
1 Normal input/output conditions. Output is generally speaking, and input is hearing, but appropriate changes can be made for writing, sign language, and so on. This is a very broad category, which includes that both speaker and hearer are capable of and competent to speak the language (e.g., they are not sick, drunk, or otherwise impaired), that they are “seriously” and “literally” engaged in speaking. This stipulation rules out not only “parasitic” (1969, p. 57) uses of language, such as “play acting, teaching a language, reciting poems, practicing pronunciation” (1969, p. 57n1) but also joke telling (1969, p. 57) and nonliteral uses, such as metaphor, irony, and sarcasm.
2 The speaker expresses a proposition p. As we saw, this allows the analysis to decouple the illocutionary force (the promising) from the locutionary aspect (the proposition, or to put it differently, what gets promised in the act of promising). We may add that if the speaker did not express a proposition, the act of promising would be very strange, as witnessed by the following imaginary conversation:(13) A: I promise.B: What?A: Nothing, I am just promising.
3 The promise must regard a future act performed by the speaker. One cannot sincerely promise to do something one has already done, for example. Nor can one promise someone else’s action (although one can promise that one will make someone else do something, but then the promise is that the speaker will coerce the other party). To put it differently, one can only commit one’s will, not someone else’s. Searle stresses too that the future act may be a non-act (as in promising not to do something).
4 The promised act must be viewed positively by the hearer and the speaker must share this belief. If the hearer believes that the promised act is to be viewed negatively, then the promise is not a promise but a threat.
5 The speaker was not going to perform the act independently of the promise. One cannot sincerely promise to go to work the next day, if one was going to do that anyway. In fact, saying I promise to go to work tomorrow presupposes that there is at least a possibility that one may not go to work the next day.
6 The speaker intends to perform the act promised. According to Searle, the distinction between sincere and insincere promises lies in the fact that the speaker does or does not intend to perform the action. Searle also notes that the sincere intention to perform an act presupposes one thinks it is feasible to do so.
7 The speaker intends to incur into the obligation to perform the act promised.
What happens if S produces a speech act but violates one of the aforementioned felicity conditions? We are then faced with a “defective” performance of a speech act (Searle, 1969, p. 54). What does it mean that there was a defective performance? The act was still performed, but one of the felicity conditions is not satisfied. Searle notes that this does not destroy the speech act entirely: if one promises to sing a song, while in fact not intending to do so, they have still performed a speech act of promising, only it was an invalid one. Searle notes that this is directly related to Austin’s concept of infelicity. We will return to this in Chapters 9 and 10.
3.1.5 Indirect Speech Acts
The analysis of speech acts discussed earlier has a significant gap: it is possible to perform a given speech act by performing a different one instead. Recall that speech acts need not be linguistic, so it should not surprise us to find that one can perform more than one speech act at a time. Searle explains this as an “indirect speech act.” Consider the simple example:
(14) Can you pass the salt?
literally this is a question concerning the capacity of H to perform an action (passing the salt). However, the illocutionary force of the utterance is that of a request to pass the salt. Simplifying a little we have two paraphrases for (14) depending whether we look at the conventional meaning (sentence) or at the meaning in the situation (utterance).
(15) Are you able to pass the salt? (sentence force = question)
(16) Please pass the salt. (utterance force = request)
Searle argues that four components are needed to explain indirect speech acts
1 the theory of speech acts
2 the cooperative principle (see Chapter 4)
3 mutually shared background information
4 an ability to make inferences (1979, p. 32).
This is particularly significant because often the last two components are ignored.
Searle thus explains indirect speech acts by arguing that S performs one speech act at the sentence level, but using the principle of cooperation produces an inferential path whereby H can reconstruct another speech act, relying of course also on the mutually shared background of knowledge that S and H share, thus performing another speech act at the utterance level. Searle notes that the conclusion (i.e., the indirect speech act performance) is always “probabilistic” (1979, p. 35). This is due to the fact that all inferences based on the cooperative principle (implicatures) are probabilistic, as we will see.
Searle identifies some general classes of indirect speech acts. Thus, for example, one can perform an indirect request by asking whether a preparatory condition (see Section 2.1) for the speech act obtains. This is the case of passing the salt, if you cannot pass the salt, say because the salt shaker is out of your reach on the other side of the table, then I cannot properly request you to pass it. Conversely, if the salt is within your reach, and no other impediments exist, then by asking whether you can perform the action I indirectly ask you to perform the action. Another example is performing a directive by stating or asking whether the propositional content holds, for example,
(17) Will you stop making that noise?
where literally, at the sentence level S is merely asking whether H will or will not continue to make the noise in question, but at the utterance level, S is telling (i.e., directing) H to stop.
Indirect speech acts tend to conventionalize, which is why different languages have different ways of asking indirectly, for example. Once the forms have become idiomatic, they are preferred by the requirement to speak idiomatically (Searle, 1979, p. 50). Finally, Searle observes that the driving force for indirectness is the desire to be polite (p. 48).
Some recent research on indirect speech acts has gone in the general direction of the field (see Chapters 7–8 and 10–11), that is, toward more attention to the context of the performance of the speech acts. For example, in Mey’s (2001) idea of the pragmeme, that is, a speech act in context, in which the “interpretation” of the situation is based not just on the speech acts performed and the social negotiation of meaning but also on the situation and its affordances, that is, the interpretations/readings it favors. The idea has attracted some attention (e.g., Allan et al., 2016).
3.1.6 Public Commitment for Speech Acts
We have seen that a mutually shared background is necessary for indirect speech acts. There is also another way in which speech acts build on a complex (and generally tacitly assumed) background of social convention. Consider the earlier example of promising. Let’s say that I promised ice cream to the children if they behave. Recall that one of the felicity conditions is to “incur into the obligation to perform the act promised.” In what sense am I obliged to provide the ice cream?