2 - What Contemporary Research Tells Us about Speech Acts

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.