4. Pragmatic aspect. Speech acts theory. Classification of speech acts

J.L. Austin claims that many utterances are equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I name this ship”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality.

Speech acts theory broadly explains these utterances as having three parts or aspects: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.

Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken place. Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one’s troth, welcoming and warning. Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned.

Some linguists have attempted to classify illocutionary acts into a number of categories or types.

David Crystal, quoting J.R. Searle, gives five such categories: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations.

Representatives – here the speaker asserts a proposition to be true, using such verbs as: affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report.

Directives – here the speaker tries to make the hearer do something, with such words as: ask, beg, challenge, command, dare, invite, insist, request.

Commissives – here the speaker commits himself (or herself) to a (future) course of action, with verbs such as: guarantee, pledge, promise, swear, vow, undertake.

Expressives – the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state of affairs, using such verbs as: apologize, appreciate, congratulate, deplore, detest, regret, thank, welcome.

Declarations – the speaker alters the external status or condition of an object or situation, solely by making the utterance: I now pronounce you man and wife, I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you be dead, I name this ship...

Pragmatic transposition of sentences

Sometimes a sentence characterized by formal features of some pragmatic type in speech acquires illocutionary power of sentences of another type. Such cases are referred to as indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example a speaker asks, “Would you like to meet me for coffee?” and another replies, “I have class.” The second speaker used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of “I have class” does not entail any sort of rejection.

5. The Composite Sentence

Unlike a simple sentence that consists of a single independent clause with no dependent clauses, a composite sentence is built up by two or more predicative lines. A general classification of composite sentences is based on two criteria – the type of syntactic connection and the rank of predicative constructions. Here compound and complex sentences are singled out. In the compound sentence predicative constructions of the high rank are connected by means of coordination while in the complex sentence – by means of subordination. According to the way in which parts of the composite sentence are joined together, two types can be singled out:

1) syndetic (by means of connectors);

2) asyndetic (without any connectors).

The process of coordination involves the linking of structures of equal grammatical rank — single words and phrases in elementary compound groups or independent clauses in compound sentences.

Complex sentences are structures of subordination with two or more immediate constituents which are not syntactically equivalent. The semantic relations that can be expressed by subordination are much more numerous and more varied than with co-ordination: all such relations as time, place, concession, purpose, etc. are expressly stated in complex sentences only.

In complex sentences, traditionally, the main and the subordinate clause are singled out. There can be different approaches to classifying subordinate clauses.

9. Текст. Его единицы и категории.

Text as an Object of Research. The Problem of the Text Unit

Text can be understood as an instance of (spoken or written) language use (an act of parole), a relatively self-contained unit of communication. As a ‘communicative occurrence’ it meets several criteria of textuality. Among them are cohesion and coherence. Cohesion can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning. The term cohesion denotes the way in which linguistic items of which texts are constituted are meaningfully interconnected in sequences. Each piece of text must be cohesive with the adjacent ones for a successful communication.

Coherence in linguistics is what makes a text semantically meaningful. It is the general topic development which provides a text with necessary integrity; even in the absence of overt links, a text may be perceived as coherent, as in various lists, charts, timetables, menus.

Textual Units One of trends in modern text linguistics is describing such syntactic formations, or text units, identifying patterns according to which they are built and studying relations between them. Irrespective of their specific features, all text units are united by their common function – they represent the text as a whole integrally expressing the textual topic. There is no universal agreement as to the term that should be used to describe text units. In the Russian tradition the following terms were used to refer to such formations: “phrase”, “strophe”, “prosaic strophe”, paragraph”, “microtext”, “syntactic complex”, “communicative bloc”, “supra-phrasal unity”. The latter is the most commonly used one. The supra-phrasal unity is a minimal text unit consisting of two or more sentences united by a common topic. In some cases the SPU can coincide with the text if it’s a short one, for example, a news item in the newspaper, a miniature story, etc. However, most commonly, the SPU is a component of a larger text. The SPU consists of at least two sentences, it is characterized by topical, communicative and structural completeness and the author’s attitude towards what is being communicated.