14 - Non-declarative speech acts

Summary

Until now, and especially in the preceding two chapters, our primary concern has been with declarative speech acts – those in which the communicative goal of the speaker is to impart information. Non-declarative speech acts, on the other hand, are manipulative in intent, and fall into one of two broad domains – the interrogative and the imperative. In Searle's terms (1969, 1979), both types are ‘directives,’ and have in common the illocutionary point of eliciting a physical response from the hearer. The ‘communicative goal’ of the imperative is to elicit action and the goal of the interrogative is to elicit information (Givón 1990a). In Kham, the two speech acts are well represented by an abundance of forms.

Recall from the discussion in §5.3 that Kham has two mutually exclusive arrangements of inflectional markers for every verb. This division of verbal inflection into two paradigmatic configurations is a major feature of all Kham dialects and cuts across not only the declarative, but across the interrogative and imperative moods as well. For declarative speech acts the difference between one configuration and the other has to do primarily with the organization of a narrative discourse into foreground and background, and will be dealt with more fully in chapter 16.

Direct and indirect questions

The difference between so-called ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ questions is signalled entirely by the choice of paradigmatic form – direct questions employ the regular, non-nominalized form of the verb, while indirect questions employ a special nominalized form of the verb.