Acting and Conversing

A speech act is usually defined as a functional unit in communication. Th Three parts of a speech 1. Locutionary act -communicative act 2. Illocutionary act -speakers intention 3. Perlocutionary act -the effect that the speech act has on the context participants world. o A theory where the effect of an utterance is analyzed in relationship to the speaker and listeners behaviour o Speech Act Theory can help us analyze utterances that seem to break Gricean maxims o Speech Act Theory can also help us examine utterances from the perspective of their function, rather than their form Austin (1962) argued that utterances have three kinds of meaning: The first kind is locutionary meaning, i.e. the literal or propositional meaning of an utterance. If someone says, It is cold in here, and only means this and nothing beyond it, then his concern is just the cold temperature in the room. The second kind of meaning is illocutionary which has to do with the social function of an utterance. Thus, the social function of It is cold in here may be a request to close the window in a certain room. The third kind of meaning, i.e. the perlocutionary force deals with the result or effect that is produced by an utterance. Thus, if the previous utterance leads to the closing of a window, then the utterance has had its perlocutionary or intended effect. A few years later in 1969, another scholar called Searle worked more on speech acts and assigned functions to them. He then classified them according to five categories, which according to Yule (1996) are as follows: 1- Declaratives, which are those kinds of speech acts that change the world through their utterance. For example: I now pronounce you husband and wife. 2- Representatives, which are those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. Statements of fact, assertions, and conclusions belong to this category. For example: William Faulkner wrote The Sanctuary.

3- Expressives, which are those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker feels. They express various psychological states such as likes, dislikes, joy, sorrow, etc. For example: Im really sorry. 4- Directives, which are those kinds of speech acts through which the speaker gets someone to do something. Commands, orders, requests, and suggestions belong to this category. For example: Dont play with the matches. 5- Commissives, which are those kinds of speech acts that speakers use to commit themselves to some future action such as promises, threats, refusals, etc. For example: Ill be back soon. Should Speech Acts Be Taught? Based on what was mentioned in the previous sections, it is now quite clear why speech acts have an important role in our daily use of language: they are important because they allow us to perform a wide range of functions. They enable us to compliment, apologize, request, complain, etc. Now if speech acts give us the chance to do all this in our native language for sure they can do the same thing in the second/foreign language that we are attempting to learn. It is important to master speech acts while learning a second language because they not only facilitate the process of communication, but also make it more effective

Cooperation and Face: Grice and Goffman Grice: In any conversation, only certain kinds of moves are possible at any particular time because of the constraints that operate to govern exchanges. These constraints limit speakers as to what they can say and listeners as to what they can infer. The cooperative principle Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Mutual understanding is the goal. 4 maxims: quantity, quality, relevance and manner. polite. The foregoing maxims have their analogy in the sphere of transactions that are not talk exchanges. kinds of rational cooperative behaviour. Why is X telling this in this way? is part of reaching a decision about what exactly X is telling me. These are involved in all Also be

The theory of implicative is important to show that the utterances are coherent. Conversation is cooperative also in the sense that speakers and listeners tend to accept each other for what they claim to be: i.e. they accept the face that the other offers. Goffman (1955) has called face-work, the work of presenting faces to each other, protecting our own face, and protecting the others face. norm. Challenging someone about the face he or she is presenting is generally avoided (not in political campaigns any more negative campaigning). Conversation therefore involves a considerable amount of role-playing. Laver and Trudgill (1979) observe, Being a listener to speech is not unlike being a detective. The affective state of the speaker and a profile of his identity are much like face here. Conversation is cooperative in that it requires people to use common-sense knowledge and all humans share this orientation and thus cooperative to deal with the world in much the same way. Some Features of Conversation Speech can be planned or unplanned (Ochs, 1979). Unplanned speech has features such as: repetitions, simple active sentences, speaker and listener combining to construct propositions, stringing of clauses together with and or but or the juxtaposition of clauses with no overt links at all, deletion of subjects and references, and use of deictic. The syntax is also not formal. How people manage conversations, how talk proceeds in turns, how one utterance relates to another often in some kind of pair relationship, how topics are introduced, developed, and changed and so on. Organizational principles Conversations are locally managed. A basic exchange has three parts: initiation, response and feedback (Stubbs, 1983). Tsui (1989) also argues for such a three part exchange in which a following move of some kind closes out the sequence. We will be playing out a little drama together and That is the cooperating to see that nothing mars the performance.

To keep the turn, a speaker may avoid eye contact with listeners; string utterances together in a seamless manner; avoid the kinds of adjacency pairings that require others to speak; employ gestures and a posture that inhibit others from speaking, etc. Tannen (1987) identifies a NY conversational style which she labels as conversational overlap. Conversations must also have ways of getting started, have some recognizable core or substance to them, i.e. topic/s, and be consultable. Each conversation must be recognizable as an instance of the genre. In France, a telephone call is an intrusion; in North America, telephone calls are not regarded as intrusive to the same extent. How often do you say, ? Brown and Yule (1983) say that it is a feature of a lot of conversation that topics are not fixed beforehand, but are negotiated in the process of conversing. It is very rare indeed that speakers and listeners work systematically through a topic. Conversants can link utterances together thematically, syntactically, or logically. Conversations must also be brought to a close (Aston, 1995). Quite often the close itself is ritualistic, e.g. an exchange of Goodbyes. Pre-closing signals may be regarded as a sub-variety of mitigating expressions used in conversation. The teacher has special rights and also has the power to control much of what happens in the classroom. He may be said to own the conversation whereas in ordinary conversations such ownership may be said to be shared. Doctor-patient or lawyer-client interviewing is also full of questioning behavior. Ordinary conversation involves evaluation too, but not at the same level of intensity as interviews for jobs, etc. Cultural background and communicative flexibility Fairclough (1989) points out that many such situations are also asymmetric insofar as power is concerned. When the parties to an exchange have both different norms of behavior and claims to power, their intentions toward each other may well be misunderstood.