Читать книгу Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA - Salvatore Attardo - Страница 39

Searle and Vanderveken (1985) have identified seven components of illocutionary force. They are detailed here.

 Illocutionary point: This is the purpose of the speech act. For example, promising has the point of committing the speaker to doing some action stated in the proposition. The point of a threat is to dissuade the hearer from doing something. The illocutionary point of a speech act is necessarily achieved by successfully performing the speech act. So, for example, I may have threatened my neighbor to keep him from shooting at the deer, but he may ignore my threat and keep shooting. However, if I successfully performed the threat I have successfully threatened the neighbor, regardless of whether the threat worked. Whether the neighbor stops shooting or not is a matter of perlocution, not of illocution.

 Degree of strength of the illocutionary point: Two speech acts may have the same illocutionary point but with different strengths. Searle and Vanderveken use the examples ofrequest vs. insistsuggest vs. solemnly swearexpress regret vs. humbly apologizeHowever, we should not assume that only two-way oppositions exist, consider(12) tell vs. state vs. assert vs. attestwhich encode increasing strength and formality of the assertion (Searle & Vanderveken, 1985, p. 183; they do not analyze attest, but the extension is straightforward).

 Mode of achievement: In some cases, an illocutionary act requires a “special set of conditions” for a felicitous performance of the act. For example, a witness in a trial may make a statement (an assertive) when asked if they would like a glass of water, but will be testifying when asked under oath if, say, they recognize the defendant. In this case, being the witness, being sworn under oath, being questioned by a lawyer or the judge, and so on constitute the mode of achievement. One cannot stand on the corner of the street, on one’s own, and testify (in the legal sense).

 Content conditions: In many cases, the illocutionary force of the speech act will put restrictions on the proposition that the utterance must convey. For example, if one makes a promise, one cannot make it about an event that happened in the past. It would be odd, to say the least, to say I promise that if you are good, we will have eaten ice cream last week. Likewise, an apology must refer to something the speaker is responsible for:4 the utterance I apologize for the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a triangle being equal to the square of the hypotenuse is clearly odd or humorous (Searle & Vanderveken, 1985, p. 16).

 Preparatory conditions: These conditions are the conditions that must obtain for the speech act to be both successful and not defective; for example, you can only successfully promise something if both the speaker and the person receiving the promise think that what is being promised is positive. Thus, it would be a defective promise to say If you behave today you will have to do all your chores tomorrow. Obviously, if the addressee believed that doing chores was a great privilege, this would be a successful promise. However, generally speaking, people do not like to do their chores.

 Sincerity conditions: A successful speech act requires that the speaker perform the assertion, request, and so on sincerely, that is, that he/she be in the “psychological state” required by the speech act: so if the speaker is stating a fact, he/she must believe it is true, if they are requesting something, they must want it, and so on.

 Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions: Much like the illocutionary point can occur with different strengths, so can the sincerity conditions. As Searle and Vanderveken (1985) put it, one can make a request (“ask”), but if the speaker “begs, beseeches, or implores” (p. 19), then they are expressing a stronger desire than a request.