CHAPTER 8 PRAGMATICS
B. Type of Pragmatic
9. Classification of Speech Acts
Searle (1979) suggests that speech acts consist of five general classifications to classify the functions or illocutionary of speech acts; these are declarations, representatives, expressive, directives, and commissive.
The declaration speech act is the act that makes the propositional content corresponds with reality. This type of speech act is the same as
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Austin’s performative sentence. To perform declarations effectively, the speaker must have special contextual privileges that allow him/her to perform an also contextual declaration. For example, when a priest says “I pronounce you husband and wife”, the priest (in the context of marriage) has the privilege to pronounce marriage and when this utterance is performed, the man and woman are then changed from singles into married people from the moment on. On the contrary, if the speaker is not a priest or has the privilege to marry people, the utterance will not be effective.
The next type of speech act is commissives. Commissives speech acts are the act of committing to future actions. This type of speech act shows the intention of the speaker in the future which will be made to happen in later moments. One example of commissive is “I will come to your home tonight”.
This example shows that the speaker intends to come to the hearer’s home at the nighttime of the day the utterance is said. Therefore the speaker commits that he/she will come to the speaker’s home at night. In simple English, the term of this speech act is commonly called promise.
Expressives are the type of speech act that shows the expression of the speaker via utterance. For example, “I’m sorry”, “I like it”, “Thank you”.
These examples show how the speaker feels about a situation. In a time when the speaker spoils coffee over someone else’s shirt, he/she will say “I’m sorry”, when in time the speaker is given a slice of cheese and likes it then he/she will say “I like it” or “Thank you”, and so on.
Another type of speech act is directives. This type of speech act aims to make someone else do something that the speaker desires. For instance,
“could you lend me a pen?” this utterance shows that the speaker requests a pen from someone else, he/she indirectly order the other person to lend him a pen this gesture is also available in a more direct way as “Lend me a pen!”
These utterances intend to make the hearer act conveyed in the utterance itself.
Directives are also known as asking, ordering, requesting, inviting, advising, and begging.
The last type of speech act is representative. In a representative speech act, the speaker intends to assert the speaker’s belief. One example is “I’m a good
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guy”, this utterance intends to show that the speaker is to make belief the hearer that the speaker is a good guy.
Speech acts can be classified into five categories as Searle in Levinson (1983: 240) states that the classifications are representatives, directives, commissives, expressive, and declarations.
1) Representatives
Representatives are speech acts that utterances commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition. The utterances are produced based on the speaker’s observation of certain things then followed by stating the fact or opinion based on the observation. When someone says “she’s beautiful”, the speaker can state the sentence based on the fact or just give his or her own opinion about the physical condition of a person. It also states what the speaker believes to be the case or not. Statements of fact, assertions, conclusions, and descriptions are all examples of the speaker representing the world as he or she believes it is. For example when someone says “The earth is flat”, it represents the speaker’s assertions about the earth. The speaker has the opinion that the earth is flat. Representatives speech act can be noted by some speech acts verb, such as: remind, tell, assert, deny, correct, state, guess, predict, report, describe, inform, insist, assure, agree, claim, beliefs, conclude.
2) Directives
Directives area speech acts that the speaker uses to get someone else to do something. These speech acts include requesting, questioning, command, orders, and suggesting. For example, when someone says “Could you lend me a pencil, please?” the utterance represents the speaker's request that the hearer does something which is to lend him a pencil.
3) Commissives
Commissives are speech acts that utterances commit the speaker to some future course of action, these include promising, threatening, offering, refusal, pledges. For example when someone says “I’ll be back”, represents the speaker’s promise that he/she will be back.
4) Expressives
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Expressives are speech acts that utterances express a psychological state. These speech acts include thanking, apologizing, welcoming, and congratulating. For example, when someone says “don’t be shy, my home is your home.” The utterance represents the speaker’s expression that he/she welcomes someone.
5) Declarations
Declarations are speech acts that utterances effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra- linguistic institutions. These speech acts include excommunicating, declaring war, christening, firing from employment. For example “you are dead to me.”
CONCLUSION
Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to the meaning in a sentence or someone's speech. Pragmatics covers phenomena including conversational implicatures, speech acts, relevance, and conversation. The pragmatic theory goes hand in hand with semantic theory, which studies aspects of meaning that are encoded grammatically or lexically. The ability to understand the intended meaning of other speakers is called pragmatic competence, so pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, namely the study of language. Pragmatics focuses on conversational implicature, which is the process by which the speaker implies and the listener concludes. Simply put, pragmatics is the study of language that is not spoken directly. Instead, the speaker hints or suggests a meaning, and the listener assumes the right intention. In a sense, pragmatics is seen as an understanding between people to adhere to certain rules of interaction. In everyday language, the meaning of words and phrases is always implied and not stated explicitly. Pragmatics is about the use of utterances in context, about how we manage to convey more than is encoded by the semantics of sentences. The extra and different meanings inferable as conversational implicatures save production effort.
Pragmatics builds on what is semantically encoded in the language. For instance, the scale of modal verbs must > should > may allow a speaker who says “Fred may leave” to implicate that there is no obligation on Fred to leave.
The presupposition is a pervasive feature of communication. There are words, like again, that act as presupposition triggers (this one signaling that the speaker or writer believes that the state or event referred to was instantiated
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before), and some syntactic constructions (for instance, relative clauses) act as presupposition triggers too, so pragmatics, In linguistics, talk the study of the use of natural language in communication; more generally, the study of the relations between languages and their users. It is sometimes defined in contrast with linguistic semantics, which can be described as the study of the rule systems that determine the literal meanings of linguistic expressions.
Pragmatics is then the study of how both literal and nonliteral aspects of communicated linguistic meaning are determined by principles that refer to the physical or social context (broadly construed) in which language is used.
In pragmatics, the three most important parts are discussed, namely conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and speech acts. Conversational implicatures talk about implied by the speaker in making an utterance are part of the content of the utterance, but do not contribute directly (or explicitly) to the content of the utterance, and are not encoded by the linguistic meaning of what has been said. For example, Amelia asserts that she is on a diet, and implies something different: that she does not eat cake. Conversational implicatures are a subset of the implications of an utterance: namely those that are part of utterance content. Presuppositions are skills talk about, in the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, presuppositions are implicit assumptions about the world or background beliefs related to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Presupposition, broadly conceived, is a type of inference associated with utterances of natural- language sentences. Presuppositional inferences are distinguished from other kinds of inferences, especially from at-issue inferences, in that they generally convey backgrounded, uncontroversial information for the context of utterance. The last is Speech acts talk about speech act is an utterance that is defined in terms of the speaker's intention and its effect on the listener. These are actions that the speaker hopes to provoke his audience. Speech acts can be in the form of requests, warnings, promises, apologies, greetings, or some statements. As you can imagine, speech acts are an important part of everyday communication. So speech act, a variety of verbal communication and also a subdivision of pragmatics, often takes place in verbal and nonverbal communication. Yule (1996) states that speech acts are a study of how the speakers and hearers use language. So, in linguistics, a speech act is an utterance defined in terms of a speaker's intention and the effect it has on a listener. Essentially, it is the action that the speaker hopes to provoke in his or
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her audience. Speech acts might be requests, warnings, promises, apologies, greetings, or any number of declarations. So speech act is an utterance that is defined in terms of the speaker's intention and its effect on the listener. These are actions that the speaker hopes to provoke his audience. Speech acts can be in the form of requests, warnings, promises, apologies, greetings, or some statements. As you can imagine, speech acts are an important part of everyday communication. So speech act, a variety of verbal communication and also a subdivision of pragmatics, often takes place in verbal and nonverbal communication. In English learning teaching the Speech Act in the classroom the teacher or instructor should consider several things since English for Indonesian students is the foreign language. The barrier mentioned previously can be found in the classroom setting. When teaching the language expression such as giving advice could be misinterpreted into something offensive.
Someone could easily interpret advice-giving acts as an act of criticism. When non-native speakers interact in a second language, they tend to transfer L1 pragmatic rules into the L2 without realizing the negative impact they may have (Blum-Kulka, 1983). In addition, even when advice is warranted, non- native speakers of English with many different L1s tend to rely on forms associated with direct advice or softened advice, such as should or had better.
Pragmatics is about the use of utterances in context, about how we manage to convey more than is encoded by the semantics of sentences. The extra and different meanings inferable as conversational implicatures save production effort. Pragmatics builds on what is semantically encoded in the language. For instance, the scale of modal verbs must > should > may allow a speaker who says “Fred may leave” to implicate that there is no obligation on Fred to leave.
The presupposition is a pervasive feature of communication. There are words, like again, that act as presupposition triggers (this one signaling that the speaker or writer believes that the state or event referred to was instantiated before), and some syntactic constructions (for instance, relative clauses) act as presupposition triggers too. Notations were introduced for implicature (+>) and presupposition (+<). Conventional acts that we perform with language – like telling, requesting, asking, greeting, advising, betting, and challenging.
Most speech acts have propositional content. The main differences between different speech acts concern the way their content is involved: for instance, is it presented as an updating of presuppositions; as a desired change to the presupposed background; or as a presupposed proposition over which we are
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expressing regret, gratitude, or whatever? Indirect speech acts – as when “Tell me your name” is used not as an order but as a question – are ones that do not stick to the three main default correlations with sentence type stating with declarative sentences, ordering with imperative sentences, and questioning with interrogative sentences.
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