• positive face - a desire to be appreciated and valued by others; desire for approval;
• negative face - concern for certain personal rights and freedoms, such asautonomy to choose actions, claims on territory, and so on; desire to beunimpeded.
Some speech acts (“face threatening acts”) intrinsically threaten the faces. Ordersand requests, for instance, threaten the negative face, whereas criticism and disagreementthreaten the positive face. The perpetrator therefore must either avoid such actsaltogether (which may be impossible for a host of reasons, including concern forher/his own face) or find ways of performing them with mitigating of their face threatening effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a son to his father) “Are you using the car tonight?” counts as a face-respecting strategy because it leaves room for father to refuse by saying “Sorry, it has already been taken (rather than the face-threatening “You may not use it”). In that sense, the speaker’s and the hearer’s faces are being attended to.
Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in its qualitative aspect (what is considered to be polite), but in its quantitative aspect as well (to what degree various language constructions realize the politeness principle). Of course there are absolute markers of politeness, e.g. “please”, but they are not numerous. Most of language units gain a certain degree of politeness in a context.
3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AND “DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?
It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech acts the relationship between the words being uttered and the illocutionary force is often oblique. For example, the sentence “This is a pig sty” might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand indirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a barnyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning-in particular, the meaning of the word “this” does not determine which area is being referred to.
How do we manage to define the illocution of an utterance if we cannot do that by its syntactic form? There are several theories trying to answer this question.
3.1. The inference theory
The basic steps in the inference of an indirect speech act are as follows [37, 286-340]:
I. The literal meaning and force of the utterance are computed by, and available to, the participants.The key to understanding of the literal meaning is the syntactical form of the utterance.
II. There is some indication that the literal meaning is inadequate (“a trigger” of an indirect speech act).
According to Searle, in indirect speech acts the speaker performs one illocutionary act but intends the hearer to infer another illocution by relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, as well as on general powers of rationality and inference, that is onillocutionary force indicating devices[43, 73]. The illocutionary point of an utterance can be discovered by an inferential process that attends to the speaker's prosody, the context of utterance, the form of the sentence, the tense and mood of verbs, knowledge of the language itself and of conversational conventions, and general encyclopaedic knowledge. The speaker knows this and speaks accordingly, aware that the hearer - as a competent social being and language user - will recognize the implications[32, 41]. So, indirectness relies on conversational implicature: there is overwhelming evidence that speakers expect hearers to draw inferences from everything that is uttered. It follows that the hearer will begin the inferential process immediately on being presented with the locution. Under the cooperative principle, there is a convention that the speaker has some purpose for choosing this very utterance in this particular context instead of maintaining silence or generating another utterance. The hearer tries to guess this purpose, and in doing so, considers the context, beliefs about normal behaviour in this context, beliefs about the speaker, and the presumed common ground.
The fact that divergence between the form and the contents of an utterance can vary within certain limits helps to discover indirect speech acts: an order can be disguised as a request, a piece of advice or a question, but it is much less probable as a compliment.
III. There are principles that allow us to derive the relevantindirect forcefrom the literal meaning and the context.
Searle suggests that these principles can be stated within his theory of felicity conditions forspeech acts [44, 38].
For example, according to Searle’s theory, a commandor a request has the following felicity conditions:
1. Asking or stating the preparatory condition:
Can you pass the salt?The hearer's ability to perform an action is being asked.
Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request.
2. Asking or stating the propositional content:
You're standing on my foot. Would you kindly get off my foot?
Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it is a request.
3. Stating the sincerity condition:
I'd like you to do this for me.
Literally it is a statement; non-literally it is a request.
4. Stating or asking the good/overriding reasons for doing an action:
You had better go now. Hadn't you better go now?Why not go now?
Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it is a request.
5. Asking if a person wants/wishes to performan action:
Would you mind helping me with this?Would you mind if I asked youif you could write me a reference?
Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request (in the last example an explicit directive verb is embedded).
All these indirect acts have several common features:
1. Imperative force is not part of the literal meaning of these sentences.
2. These sentences are not ambiguous.
3. These sentences are conventionally used to make requests. They often have "please" at end or preceding the verb.
4. These sentences are not idioms, but are idiomatically used as requests.
5. These sentences can have literal interpretations.
6. The literal meanings are maintained when they question the physical ability:Can you pass the salt? - No,it’s too far from me. I can’t reach it.
7. Both the literal and the non-literal illocutionary acts are made when making a report on the utterance:
The speaker: Can you come to my party tonight?
The hearer: I have to get up early tomorrow.
Report: He said he couldn't come. OR:He said he had to get up early next morning.
A problem of the inference theory is that syntactic forms with a similar meaning often show differences in the ease in whichthey trigger indirect speech acts:
a)Can you reach the salt?
b) Are you able to reach the salt?
c) Is it the case that you at present have the ability to reach the salt?
While (a) is most likely to be used as a request, (b) is less likely, and (c) is highly unlikely, although they seem to expressthe same proposition.
Another drawback of the inference theory is the complexity of the algorithm it offers for recognizing and deciphering the true meaning of indirect speech acts. If the hearer had to pass all the three stages every time he faced an indirect speech act, identifying the intended meaning would be time-consuming whereas normally we recognize each other’s communicative intentions quickly and easily.
3.2. Indirect speech acts as idioms?
Another line of explanation of indirect speech acts was brought forward by Jerrold Sadock [42, 197]. According to his theory,indirect speech acts are expressions based on an idiomatic meaning added to their literal meaning (just like the expression “to pushup daisies” has two meanings: “to increase the distance of specimens of Bellis perennis from the center of theearth by employing force” and “to bedead”). Of course, we donot have specific idioms here, but rather general idiom schemes. For example, the scheme “Can you + verb?”is idiomatic for commands and requests.
However, the idiomatic hypothesis is questionable as a general strategy. One problem is that a reactionto an indirect speech act can be composite to both the direct and the indirect speech act, e.g.
The speaker:Can you tell me the time?
The hearer:Yes, it’s three o’clock.
We never find this type of reaction to the literal and the idiomatic intepretation of an idiom:
The speaker:Is he pushing the daisies by now?
Hearer 1: Yes/no (the idiomatic meaning is taken into account).
Hearer 2: Depends what you mean. As a gardener, yes (the literal meaning is taken into account).
Another problem is that there is a multitude of different (and seemingly semanticallyrelated) forms that behave in a similar way:
a)Can you pass me the salt?
b) Could you pass me the salt?
c)May I have the salt?
d) May I ask you to pass the salt?
e) Would you be so kind to pass the salt?
f) Would you mind passing the salt?
Some of these expressions are obviously semantically related (e.g. can/could, would you be so kind/wouldyou mind), and it seems that it is this semantic relation that makes them express the same indirect speechact. This is different for classical idioms, where the phrasing itself matters:
a)topush the daisies “to be dead” vs. topush the roses
b)tokick the bucket “to die” vs. to kick the barrel.
Hence, a defender of the idiom hypothesis must assume a multitude of idiom schemes, some of which areobviously closely semantically related.
Summarizing, we can say that there are certain cases of indirect speech acts that have to be seen as idiomatized syntactic constructions (for example, English why not-questions.) But typically, instances of indirectspeech acts should not be analyzed as simple idioms.
3.3. Other approaches to the problem
The difference of the idiomatic and inference approaches can be explained by different understanding of the role of convention in communication. The former theory overestimates it while the latterunderestimates it, and both reject the qualitative diversity of conventionality. Correcting this shortcoming, Jerry Morgan writes about two types of convention in indirect speech acts [39, 261]:conventions of language and conventions of usage. The utterance “Can you pass the salt?” cannot be considered as a regular idiom (conventions of language), but its use for an indirect request is undoubtedly conventional, i.e. habitual for everyday speech that is always characterized by a certain degree of ritualization.
In accordance with this approach the function of an indirect speech act is conventionally fixed, and an inference process is not needed. Conventions of usageexpress what Morgan calls “short-circuited implicatures”: implicatures that once were motivated by explicitreasoning but which now donot have to be calculated explicitly anymore.
There is an opinion that indirect speech acts must be considered as language polysemy, e.g. “Why not + verb?” construction serves as a formal marker of not just the illocutive function of a question, but of that of a request,e.g. “Why not clean the room right now?”
According to Grice and Searle, the implicit meaning of an utterance can always be inferred from its literal meaning. But according to the relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson [46, 113], the process of interpretation of indirect speech acts does not at all differ from the process of interpretation of direct speech acts. Furthermore, it is literal utterances that are often marked and sound less natural than utterances with an indirect meaning. For example, the utterance “She is a snake.”having an implicit meaning sounds more natural than “She is spiteful.”Exclamatory utterances “It’s not exactly a picniс weather!” and“It’s not a day for cricket!” soundmore expressive and habitual than the literalutterance “What nasty weather we are having!” The interrogative construction expressing a request “Could you put on your black dress?” is more customary than the performative: “I suggest that you should put on your black dress.”
To summarize: there is no unanimity among linguists studying indirect speech acts as to how we discover them in each other’s speech and “extract” their meaning. Every theory has got its strong and weak points, and the final word has not yet been said.
4. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN
Speech act theories considered above treat an indirect speech act as the product of a single utterance based on a single sentence with only one illocutionary point - thus becoming a pragmatic extension to sentence grammars. In real life, however, we do not use isolated utterances: an utterance functions as part of a larger intention or plan. In most interactions, the interlocutors each have an agenda; and to carry out the plan, the illocutions within a discourse are ordered with respect to one another. Very little work has been done on the contribution of the illocutions within utterances to the development of understanding of a discourse.
As Labov and Fanshel pointed out, “most utterances can be seen as performing several speech acts simultaneously ... Conversation is not a chain of utterances, but rather a matrix of utterances and actions bound together by a web of understandings and reactions ... In conversation, participants use language to interpret to each other the significance of the actual and potential events that surround them and to draw the consequences for their past and future actions.”(Labov, Fanshel 1977: 129).
Attempts to break out of the sentence-grammar mould were made by Labov and Fanshel [35], Edmondson [29], Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper [24]. Even an ordinary and rather formal dialogue between a customer and a chemist contains indirectness (see table 4.1).
Table 4.1
Indirect speech acts of an ordinary formal dialogue
| Participant | Utterance | Indirect speech acts |
| Customer | Do you have any Actifed? | Seeks to establish preparatory condition for transaction and thereby implies the intention to buy on condition that Actifed is available. |
| Chemist | Tablets or linctus? | Establishes a preparatory condition for the transaction by offering a choice of product. |
| Customer | Packet of tablets, please. | Requests one of products offered, initiates transaction. In this context, even without “please”, the noun phrase alone will function as a requestive. |
| Chemist | That'll be $18.50. | A statement disguising a request for payment to execute the transaction. |
| Customer | OK. | Agrees to contract of sale thereby fulfilling t buyer's side of the bargain. |
| Chemist | Have a nice day! | Fulfills seller's side of the bargain and concludes interaction with a conventional farewell. |
Discourse always displays one or more perlocutionary functions. Social interaction predominates in everyday chitchat; informativenessin academic texts; persuasiveness in political speeches; and entertainment in novels. But many texts combine some or all these functions in varying degrees to achieve their communicational purpose. For instance, although an academic text is primarily informative, it also tries to persuade readers to reach a certain point of view; it needs to be entertaining enough to keep the reader's attention; and most academic texts try to get the reader on the author’s side through social interactive techniques such as use of authorial we to include the reader.
The genre of the text shapes the strategy for its interpretation: we do not expect nonliterality when reading medical prescriptions. For every genre there is an illocutionary standard. For example, a letter of recommendation is an alloy of declarations and expressives. A request added to it converts it into a petition whereas a detailed list of facts from the person’s life turns it into a biography. In canonized texts, lack of “moulds” has a significant pragmatic load.