Lesson 6 Flashcards
What are the three levels or aspects of speech acts?
1- locutionary acts: producing a meaningful utterance.
2- illocutionary acts: producing a communicative intention, a request.
3- perlocutionary acts: producing an effect, the effect of the communicative intention.
What is the speech vent?
The circumstances that help the interlocutor to interpret the speech act performed through the utterance.
What are the categories of illocutionary acts?
1- representatives or assertives: assertive language is concerned with facts the purpose is to inform.
2- directives: they are intended to produce some effect through action on the part of the hearer.
3- commissives: these acts commit the speaker to some future action, they are often performed in the interest of someone other than the speaker.
4- expressives: the function is to express the speaker’s attitudes towards a state of affairs.
5- declarations/performatives: they perform the action stated by the propositional content. They tend to occur in institutionalized contexts and are performed by specially authorized people.
What is politeness?
Politeness is a social phenomenon which is central to conversation and verbal interactions in general. Being polite means being refined, elegant, courteous; a polite behavior is marked by consideration for others, tact and observance of a set of shared social norms. Politeness is a universal concept but at the same time it is culturally embedded and cultural specific: what is polite in one culture could be perceived as offensive in another society.
What are the two models of politeness?
1- Brown and Levinson (1987): based on the notion of face, facework and on the risks inherent in face threatening acts (FTAs).
2- Leech (1983): the politeness principle and maxims of politeness operating in conversational exchanges. Speech act theories as starting points with a particular focus on English and on British society.
What is the notion of face (Brown and Levinson)?
The positive social value a person effectively claims for himself but the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes.
Being polite means preserving our own and are interlocutors face. Hence being polite means not to threaten and damage the interlocutors public face.
What are the politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson)?
Bald on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record.
Main features of “bald on-record”:
Strategies perform a FTAs without trying to minimize the threat to the hearer’s face. They tend to occur among socially close participants or in specific contextual circumstances.
Main features of “positive politeness”:
It seeks to minimize the threat to the hearers positive face. They are mostly used in situations where participants know each other fairly well and turn to foster solidarity, friendship, in-groupness, positive interpersonal relations.
Main features of “negative politeness”:
It seeks to avoid or minimize the imposition on the hearer’s negative face. These strategies presume that the speakers action may cause embarrassment or offense and cannot be performed on-record.
Main features of “off-record”:
Strategies are intrinsically indirect strategies. The speaker signals that some inferences are to be made in order to access the real aim of the utterance.
What are the politeness markers in English?
General politeness markers, play-downs, hedges, understaters and downtoners, committers, forewarning, hesitators, intensifiers, address forms and vocatives.
Main features of “general politeness markers”:
Expressions which protect the addressee’s face, show respect and stimulate cooperative behavior.
Main features of “play-downs”:
Syntactic means to tone down the assertiveness of a speech act.
Main features of “hedges”:
Being vague and avoiding being precise to leave options to the addressee.
