Читать книгу Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA - Salvatore Attardo - Страница 33

The reader will recall that philosophical semantics sees reference and truth as the central ideas needed to “explain” meaning. The theory of speech acts is a reaction against the view that language is used only to communicate about the truth of propositions. In fact, the idea is, to paraphrase Austin’s inspired title, that one can “do stuff” using words. So, besides describing the world, what can language do? Plenty of stuff as we will see.

We will start out by discussing the Ordinary Language school of philosophy and then focus on Austin and Searle. We will then characterize speech acts in terms of illocutionary force and felicity conditions to understand exactly how they work and this will then allow us to move on to indirect speech acts, the most complex and of course most rewarding concept of speech act theory. We will then pivot to the teaching of speech acts in SLA and TESOL.