Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T17:12:07.218Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - What Contemporary Research Tells Us about Speech Acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Lorena Pérez-Hernández
Affiliation:
University of Rioja, Spain
Get access

Summary

Chapter 2 provides an accessible outlook on contemporary research on speech acts, explaining and illustrating the latest pragmatic, functional, conversational, and cognitive/constructional contributions to the understanding of illocutionary acts. The chapter advocates a contrastive, cognitive/constructional theory of speech acts, showing how this approach is capable of integrating pragmatic, semantic, and formal aspects of speech acts into a unified and comprehensive account that is compatible with current psycholinguistic knowledge on speech acts production and understanding. This chapter sets the theoretical foundations for Chapters 4 and 5, offering a fully-fledged theoretical proposal on the semantic and formal features of directive speech acts in terms of illocutionary constructions and metonymic operations. The semantic side of the constructions is captured in the form of illocutionary ICMs, and the formal side takes the form of inventories of base constructions and linguistic realisation procedures. It is further argued that speakers can modulate the explicitness of their directive speech acts through (multiple-source)-in-target metonymies.

Type
Chapter
Information
Speech Acts in English
From Research to Instruction and Textbook Development
, pp. 16 - 68
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×