5. Speech act theory. Direct and indirect speech acts. Types of speech acts

Various kinds of actions performed with the help of language: making statements, asking questions, giving commands, offering wishes, blessings, curses; performing rituals and ceremonies, pardoning or sentencing a criminal, opening or closing a meeting, etc. are referred to as speech acts. In short, the speech act is an utterance conceived as an act by which the speaker does something [Matthews 1997: 349]. J. R. Searle developed a theory of speech acts and proposed their detailed classification on the basis of work by J.L. Austin. This classification includes five major classes of speech acts: declarations, representatives, expressives, directives and commissives:

Table 1. Types of speech acts and their meaning

Speech act type	Direction of fit	S - Speaker, X - Situation
Declarations E.g. You’re fired. I pronounce you man and wife. Representatives E.g. It was a warm sunny day. John is a liar. Expressives E.g. I’m really sorry. Happy birthday! (statements of pleasure, joy, sorrow, etc.) Directives E.g. Don’t touch that (commands, orders, suggestions) Commissives E.g. I’ll be back (promises, threats, pledges – what we intend to do)	words change the world make words fit the world make words fit the world make the world fit words make the world fit words	S causes X S believes X S feels X S wants X S intends X

This speech-act classification has had a great impact on linguistics. J. Searle can also be merited for introducing a theory of indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts are cases in which one speech act is performed indirectly, by way of performing another: Can you pass me the salt? Though the sentence is interrogative, it is conventionally used to mark a request – we cannot just answer “yes” or “no”. According to the modern point of view such utterances contain two illocutionary forces, with one of them dominating. Thus, “indirect speech acts are those in which there is a mismatch between the sentence type and the intended force” [Kroeger 2006: 197].

E.g.: (a) Why don’t you just be quiet? (command, interrogative form)

(b) Don’t tell me you lost it! (question, imperative form)

(c) Who cares? (statement, interrogative form)

The reason why indirect speech acts are used is often politeness. Formulating an indirect speech act like Can you pass me the salt? the speaker allows for no as an answer. Thus politeness is one of the topics studied in pragmatics.

Another classification of speech acts was introduced by G. Potcheptsov. It is based on purely linguistic principles. The main criterion for pragmatic classification of utterances is the way communicative intention is expressed. This classification includes six basic speech acts: constatives, promissives, menacives, performatives, directives and questions [Иванова et al 1981: 267-281].

The authors of ‘Cambridge Grammar of English’ divide speech acts into five broad types: constatives (the speaker asserts something about the truth of a proposition, associated with acts such as: affirming, claiming, concluding, denying, exclaiming, maintaining, predicting, stating beliefs), directives (the speaker intends to make the hearer act in a particular way, associated with acts such as: advising, challenging, daring, forbidding, insisting, instructing, permitting, prohibiting, questioning, requesting, suggesting, warning), commissives (the speaker commits to a course of action, associated with acts such as: guaranteeing, offering, inviting, promising, vowing, undertaking), expressive, or acknowledgements (the speaker expresses an attitude or reaction concerning a state of affairs, associated with acts such as: apologizing, appreciating, complimenting, condemning, congratulating, regretting, thanking, welcoming), and declarations (the speaker performs the speech act solely by making the utterance, e.g.: I pronounce you man and wife; I declare the meeting closed, I name the ship X). As it is seen, speech acts has to do with the speaker’s intention rather than the content-meaning of the utterance [Cambridge Grammar 2007: 680]. On the whole, this theory focuses on the interpersonal meanings of grammar.