This essay concerns the analysis of speech act verbs. It offers a range of ideas which form theoretical preliminaries to the analysis of this phenomenon.

Did earlier speakers of English use the same speech acts that we use today? Did they use them in the same way? How did they signal speech act values and how did they negotiate them in case of uncertainty? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this volume in innovative case studies that cover a wide range of speech acts from Old English to Present-day English. All the studies offer careful discussions of methodological and theoretical issues as well as detailed descriptions of specific speech acts. The first part of the volume is devoted to directives and commissives, i.e. speech acts such as requests, commands and promises. The second part is devoted to expressives and assertives and deals with speech acts such as greetings, compliments and apologies. The third part, finally, contains technical reports that deal primarily with the problem of extracting speech acts from historical corpora.

In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages.

This book is an introduction to the relationship between the morphosyntactic properties of sentences and their associated illocutionary forces or force potentials. The volume begins with several chapters dedicated to important theoretical and methodological issues, such as sentence and utterance meaning, illocutionary force, clause types, and cross-linguistic comparison. The bulk of the book is then composed of chapter-length case studies that systematically investigate typologically prominent clause types and their forces, such as declaratives and assertions, interrogatives and questions, and imperatives and commands. These case studies begin with an overview of the necessary theoretical foundations, followed by a discussion of the grammatical structures of English, and an assessment of the relevant cross-linguistic facts. Each chapter ends with a succinct summary of the most important findings, practice exercises, and recommendations for further reading and research. Overall, the book works towards developing a gradient model of clause types that goes substantially beyond the traditional distinction between major and minor clause types. It draws on insights from linguistics, philosophy, and sociology, and may be used as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntax.

Speech-act theory is the interdisciplinary study of the wide range of things we do with words. Originally stemming from the influential work of twentieth-century philosophers, including J. L. Austin and Paul Grice, recent years have seen a resurgence of work on the topic. On one hand, a new generation of linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists have made impressive progress toward reverse-engineering the psychological underpinnings that allow us to do so much with language. Meanwhile, speech-act theory has been used to enrich our understanding of pressing social issues that include freedom of speech, racial slurs, and the duplicity of political discourse. This volume presents fourteen new essays by many of the philosophers and linguists who have led this resurgence. The topics span a methodological range that includes formal semantics and pragmatics, foundational issues about the nature of linguistic representation, and work on a variety of forms of indirect and/or uncooperative speech that occupies the intersection of the philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy. Several of the contributions demonstrate the benefits of integrating the methodologies and perspectives of these literatures. The essays are framed by a comprehensive introductory survey of the contemporary literature written by the editors.

This book presents a new classification of speech acts. It is an alter native to all previously published classifications of speech acts. The classification proposed here is based on an extensive set of data, name lyon all the verbs designating linguistic activities and aspects thereof. A theoretically and methodologically justifiable method is used to proceed in a number of steps from these data to the classification. The classification is documented in a lexicon with two sections. The first section exhibits the classification in all its details. Each verb is listed to its meaning at the appropriate place in the classification. according The second, alphabetically ordered section enables one to locate the verbs classified in the first part. The speech act classification as presented in this book has a number of consequences for linguistic theorizing: the book makes advances in three linguistically relevant fields - speech act theory, lexicology, and theory of meaning. In speech act theory firstly of course a classifica tion is proposed which is theoretically justified and which is simul taneously based explicitly and systematically on linguistic data. Second ly, a wider concept of speech acts is introduced which proves its value by making possible a linguistically justified classification. Thirdly, the concept of speech act sequence (or more generally partial order) is brought into focus as a major organizational principle of the semantic relation between speech acts.

Classic pragmatic theories emphasize the linguistic aspect of illocutionary acts and forces. However, as multimodality has gained importance and popularity, multimodal pragmatics has quickly become a frontier of pragmatic studies. This book adds to this new research trend by offering a perspective of situated discourse in the Chinese context. Using the multimodal corpus approach, this study examines how speakers use multiple devices to perform illocutionary acts and express illocutionary forces. Not only does the author use qualitative analysis to study the types, characteristics, and emergence patterns of illocutionary forces, he also performs a quantitative, corpus-based analysis of the interaction of illocutionary forces, emotions, prosody, and gestures. The results show that illocutionary forces are multimodal in nature while meaning in discourse is created through an interplay of an array of modalities. Students and scholars of pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and Chinese linguistics will benefit from this title.

Speech Act Theory: A Univen Study was undertaken to investigate the pragmatic value of the utterances of selected students at the University of Venda, South Africa. Utterances of second-language users of a language reflect the wealth of their language experiences and hence caution has to be exercised when conducting an investigation into such utterances. It is within this background that this investigation was conducted into the meaning-creation strategies and abilities of the participants in this study. The very idiocyncratic utterances investigated demonstrated vividly the multi-dimensional thought process exploited by the creators of these samples. Also demonstrated by the analyses is the nature of communication and the amount of linguistic interaction necessary for interlocutors to create meaning.

The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to language goes hand in hand with a renewed interest in corpus research and quantitative methods of analysis. Many researchers feel that only in this way one can do justice to the complex interaction of forces and factors involved in linguistic variability, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the ongoing evolution of the field. By bringing together a series of analyses that rely on extensive corpuses to shed light on sociolinguistic, historical, and comparative forms of variation, the volume highlights the interaction between these subfields. Most of the contributions go back to talks presented at the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leuven in 2001. The volume starts with a global typological view on the sociolinguistic landscape of Europe offered by Peter Auer. It is followed by a methodological proposal for measuring phonetic similarity between dialects designed by Paul Heggarty, April McMahon, and Robert McMahon. Various papers deal with specific phenomena of socially and conceptually driven variation within a single language. For Dutch, José Tummers, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts analyze inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, Reinhild Vandekerckhove focuses on interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects, and Arjan van Leuvensteijn studies competing forms of address in the 17th century Dutch standard variety. The cultural and conceptual dimension is also present in the diachronic lexicosemantic explorations presented by Heli Tissari, Clara Molina, and Caroline Gevaert for English expressions referring to the experiential domains of love, sorrow and anger, respectively: the history of words is systematically linked up with the images they convey and the evolving conceptualizations they reveal. The papers by Heide Wegener and by Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki constitute a plea against arbitrariness of alternations at the level of nominal morphology: dealing with marked plural forms in German, and with gender assignment to English loanwords in the Scandinavian languages, respectively, their distributional accounts bring into the picture a variety of motivating factors. The four cross-linguistic studies that close the volume focus on the differing ways in which even closely related languages exploit parallel morphosyntactic patterns. They share the same methodological concern for combining rigorous parametrization and quantification with conceptual and discourse-functional explanations. While Griet Beheydt and Katleen Van den Steen confront the use of formally defined competing constructions in two Germanic and two Romance languages, respectively, Torsten Leuschner as well as Gisela Harras and Kirsten Proost analyze how a particular speaker's attitude is expressed differently in various Germanic languages.

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.