1 Introduction 2 Speech Act Theory: Examining Language at the Utterance Level

Notes 1 Introduction 1. An initial distinction of this type can be found in Dascal (1983) under 'socio pragmatics' and 'psychopragmatics'. 2. For a detailed historical account of the development of the study of spoken discourse (el discurso oral) in Spanish from 1950 to 1999, including aspects of pragmatics as defined here, the reader is referred to Cortes Rodriguez (2002). 2 Speech Act Theory: Examining Language at the Utterance Level 1. One of Grewendorf's (2002) arguments, for instance, has to do with felicity conditions: If in uttering a performative we implicitly performed the act of making a statement and explicitly performed the act denoted by the performative verb, then performatives would be subject to two different sets of felicity conditions: the conditions for the act of making a statement and the con ditions for the act denoted by the performative verb (p. 33). Grewendorf, nonetheless, provides examples that show that only one set of conditions can be fulfilled. 2. Achugar (2002) defines piropos as compliments with an amorous or sexual tone, normally issued to strangers in the street and normally performed for an audience. It should be noted, however, that although Achugar's distinc tion between piropos and other types of compliments stands for ES, it does not necessarily hold for all varieties of Spanish. 3. See a related idea under the notion of adjacency pairs within conversation analysis (3.3.1). 4. In his seminal work, Speech Acts. An Essay on the Philosophy ofLanguage, Searle (1969) outlines his overall speech act theory, offering a detailed, rule-based characterization of speech acts. Searle (197 5) develops the notion of indirect speech acts, and, finally, Searle (1976) offers a taxonomy of speech acts. Searle's 1975 and 1976 publications are also contained, with slight modifi cations, in Expression and Meaning (Searle, 1979). 5. This example was obtained through participant observation. All other exam ples in the book where the source is not stipulated were obtained in the same manner. 6. Goodwin and Duranti (1992) express a related criticism when they point out that, with Searle's development of the theory, interest shifted from conven tions and context to a focus on intentionality, leaving out 'reference to soci- 231 232 Notes eta! norms or conventions that may exist outside of the speaker's conscious intentions to communicate' (p. 18). 7. This view can be more clearly inferred from Searle, 1975. 8. Example from Miranda Stewart, personal communication. 9. Alston (1991) notes that Searle does not provide an unambiguous definition of 'point' or 'purpose', so it is not clear whether purpose is intended to mean the same as point, such as to commit the speaker to what is promised, in the case of promises, or whether it refers to the speaker's purpose, which may be a variety of things. 10. Alston (1991) notes that there is an oddity in having expressives as a sepa rate category of illocutionary acts where 'something which is a feature of all illocutionary acts is here [in the case of expressives] the basic illocutionary point' (p. 73). 11. See also Gonzalez Mangas's (2000) analysis of how participants in the exchange listed under (30) arrive at each other's intended meaning. 12. Some requests, as Blum-Kulka eta/. (1989, p. 276) acknowledge, can be mul tiple-headed; that is, they may have more than one minimal unit realizing the requestive goal, as in 'Clean up the kitchen. Get rid of this mess'. 13. Blum-Kulka and House (1989) relabel this category as 'impositives', whereas they refer to strong and mild hints (non-conventional indirectness) as 'hints' only. 14. The notion of 'hedged performatives' belongs to Fraser (1975). 15. This is in contrast to the view expressed by Leech (1983), for whom a scale of (in)directness can be established and who associates indirectness with ten tativeness, 'the more indirect an illocution is, the more diminished and ten tative its force tends to be' (p. 108). This does not mean, however, that all indirectness leads to more politeness. 'Can't you sit down?' is an example Leech (1983) provides of indirectness leading to less politeness. 16. Blum-Kulka et al.'s (1989) basic notions of head acts and levels of directness, and internal and external modification have been applied to the analysis of invitations (Garcia, 1999) and reprimands (Garcia, 1996), among other speech acts. Placencia (2000), however, notes that the application of these notions can be problematic with complex speech acts (such as, complaints, made up of chains of acts with multiple functions), where it can be difficult to identify a central head act, as House and Kasper (1981) or Olshtain and Weinbach (1987) have done in their studies. 17. Additionally, Pratt (1981) points out that people do not always speak for themselves, but 'for or through other people' (p. 9); that is, in some sort of institutionalized role, where the intentions are not those of the private individual. 18. Hence, building on Wittgenstein's notion of language games, Levinson (1979) proposes the notion of activity types within which utterances are embedded and within which they have to be examined. Allwood (1995) and Linell (1996), on the other hand, discuss related proposals under the notions of an activity based approach to meaning and communicative projects, respectively. 19. Pratt (1981) goes even further when she accentuates the overemphasis within the theory on one-to-one, private communication: the norm within the theory is to have a speaker formulating his/her intention and a hearer Notes 233 understanding that intention, while speech situations often involve multi ple participants with multiple intentions toward one another. 20. The notion of inter-act, rather than speech act, is thus proposed by Linen (1996) to emphasize the collaborative nature of communicative actions (see also Linen and Markova, 1993). 21. In Haverkate's (1979) view, verbs such as, 'persuade' or 'convince', which in Austin and Searle's proposals appear as perlocutionary acts, are not speech acts as such; it is possible, therefore, to refer only to their 'effect' on the hearer. 22. In his 1994 publication, Haverkate follows Searle (1969), subsuming the referring and predicating acts under the propositional act. 23. Haverkate (1984) modifies his model slightly retaining the notion of allo cution not as a subact, but as the strategical component of the speech act that influences the performance of the different subacts. He does so in order to 'make it clear that speakers develop specific strategies in performing each of the subacts of the speech act' (p. 45). 24. See also Ortega Olivares (1985). 25. On the function of t.me entendes? in AS in the context of informal interac tions, see Boretti (1999). 26. It should be noted that the overview of speech act studies that we offer con centrates on those based on corpora of spoken data, usually within particu lar sociocultural contexts. Other studies, which are based on literary works, for example, or for which no indication of the corpus employed is given, have not been included. It should also be noted that we only report on studies published in Spanish and English. This applies to the other chapters in the book too. 27. The label 'single language and culture' does not imply that researchers nec essarily regard culture as fully homogeneous. In fact, variation in speech act realization is often studied in relation to considerations of stable character istics of the participants (mainly age and sex), as well as situated features (such as the degree of social distance obtaining between the participants in an interaction, power and ranking of the imposition) (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987). This is also the case in cross-cultural studies. 28. We refer here to situations where people with different cultural backgrounds interact in the same language, which might be the first language for both groups, or the first for one group and the second or later language for the other (see Clyne, 1998 for related distinctions). In the latter case, the inter language of the group becomes the focus of examination. 29. In the broadest sense, Blum-Kulka and Sheffer (1993) define interlanguage pragmatics as 'concerned with the ways in which nonnatives do things with words in a second language' (p.l96). They say that, although 'we have been used to thinking about interlanguage as an L2 (second language) specific notion' (p. 197), in bilingual situations like the ones they examine in their study, the participants are 'in effect, in contact with two incongruent prag matic systems, each realized by a culturally specific style of language use' (p. 197). According to this definition, some intercultural studies may also be subsumed under interlanguage; however, the notion might be relevant when describing the language of one of the participants, but not necessarily of both. 30. Intercultural encounters may take place in bilingual contexts. Nevertheless, 234 Notes here we keep the distinction between intercultural and bilingual studies in order to distinguish those studies that deal with two cultural groups in interaction (intercultural studies) from those where members from the same cultural group, who have the influence from two or more languages and cultures, interact with one another, as in the case of Chicanos interacting with other Chicanos (see, for example, Yanez, 1990 here). 31. See also Ferrer and Sanchez Lanza's (1998) examination of features of requests and commands. 32. It should be noted that Blum-Kulka and House (1989) comment on the need to examine a larger sample of Argentinian Spanish to further confirm the results of their study. They indicate, nonetheless, that 'there is evidence to suggest that they [the results of their study] reliably reflect a general Spanish trend for higher levels of directness than those acceptable in English' (p.

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