Directives (with a special emphasis on requests)
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.What is a directive?
- 2.1Definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions
- 2.2Definitions in terms of graded membership
- 2.3Provisional conclusion
- 3.Subtypes of directives
- 3.1Definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions
- 3.2Definitions in terms of graded membership
- 3.3Provisional conclusion
- 4.Directives as face-threatening speech acts
- 5.Requests and pre-requests
- 6.Requests as speech events
- 7.The social effectiveness of directives
- 8.Conclusion, recent developments and future directions
-
Notes
-
References
References (63)
References
Alston, William P. 2000. Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ball, Brian. 2014. “Speech acts: Natural or normative kinds? The case of assertion.” Mind and Language 29: 336–350.
Bara, Bruno G., and Maurizio Tirassa. 2000. “Neuropragmatics: Brain and communication.” Brain and Language 71: 10–14.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper (eds). 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: Ablex.
Boux, Isabella, Rosario Tomasello, Luigi Grisoni and Friedemann Pulvermüller. 2021. “Brain signatures predict communicative function of speech production in interaction.” Cortex 135: 127–145.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caballero, Jonathan, Nikos Vergis, Xiaoming Jiang and Marc D. Pell. 2018. “The sound of im/politeness.” Speech Communication 102: 39–53.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. “Towards an anatomy of impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367.
Davies, Mark. (2008–). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990–present. Available online at [URL]
Decock, Sofie, and llse Depraetere. 2018. “(In)directness and complaints: A reassessment.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 33–46.
Depraetere, Ilse, Sofie Decock and Nicolas Ruytenbeek. 2021. “Linguistic (in)directness in Twitter complaints : A contrastive analysis of railway complaint interactions.” Journal of Pragmatics 171: 215–233.
Egorova, Natalia, Friedemann Pulvermüller and Yury Shtyrov. 2014. “Neural dynamics of speech act comprehension: An MEG study of naming and requesting.” Brain Topography 27: 375–392.
Francik, Ellen P., and Herbert H. Clark. 1985. “How to make requests that overcome obstacles to compliance.” Journal of Memory and Language 24: 560–568.
Frank, Robert H. 1988. Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. New York: Norton.
Freytag, Vera. 2020. Exploring Politeness in Business Emails: A Mixed-Methods Analysis. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 1986. “What makes some indirect speech acts conventional?” Journal of Memory and Language 25: 181–196.
Grice, H. P. 1957. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66: 377–388.
Grice, H. P. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1972. “Models of the interaction of language and social life.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 35–71. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kamp, Hans, and Barbara Partee. 1995. “Prototype theory and compositionality.” Cognition 57: 129–191.
Kissine, Mikhail. 2009. “Illocutionary forces and what is said.” Mind and Language 24: 122–138.
Kissine, Mikhail. 2013. From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levinson, Stephen. 1992. “Activity types and language.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, Stephen. 2012. “Interrogative intimations: On a possible social economics of interrogatives.” In Questions: Formal, Functional, and Interactional Perspectives, ed. by Jan P. de Ruiter, 11–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Millikan, Ruth G. 1984. Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Murphy, Beth, and Joyce Neu. 2006. “My grade’s too low: The speech act set of complaining.” In Speech Acts Across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language, ed. by Susan M. Gass and Joyce Neu, 191–216. Berlin; New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
O’Halloran, Kay L., Sabine Tan and Marissa, K. L. E. 2014. “Multimodal pragmatics.” In Pragmatics of Discourse, ed. by Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron, 239–268. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Olshtain, Elite, and Liora Weinbach. 1993. “Interlanguage features of the speech act of complaining.” In Interlanguage Pragmatics, ed. by Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 108–122. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pérez Hernández, Lorena. 2013. “Illocutionary constructions: (Multiple source)-in-target metonymies, illocutionary ICMs, and specification links.” Language and Communication 33: 128–149.
Pérez Hernández, Lorena, and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza. 2002. “Grounding, semantic motivation, and conceptual interaction in indirect directive speech acts.” Journal of Pragmatics 35: 259–284.
Reddy, Michael. 1979. “The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language.” In Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony, 164–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rohrer, Tim. 2007. “Embodiment and experientialism.” In Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, 25–47. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2017a. “The comprehension of indirect requests: Previous work and future directions.” In Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line, ed. by Ilse Depraetere and Raphael Salkie, 293–322. Cham: Springer.
Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2017b. The Mechanics of Indirectness: A Case Study of Directive Speech Acts. PhD dissertation, Université libre de Bruxelles.
Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2019. “Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests: An empirical contribution to the study of (im)politeness in French e-mail speech acts.” Lexique 24: 29–47.
Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2021. Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruytenbeek, Nicolas, Marie Verschraegen and Sofie Decock. 2021. “Exploring the impact of platforms’ affordances on the expression of negativity in online hotel reviews.” Journal of Pragmatics 186: 289–307.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, vol. 1., ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1980. “Preliminaries to preliminaries: ‘Can I ask you a question?’” Sociological Inquiry 50: 104–152.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. 1975. “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press.
Searle, John R., and Daniel Vanderveken. 1985. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stalnaker, Robert. 2002. “Common ground.” Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 701–721.
Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Tomasello, Rosario. 2023. “Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts.” Brain and Language 236: 105203.
Tomasello, Rosario, Luigi Grisoni, Isabella Boux, Daniela Sammler and Friedemann Pulvermüller. 2022. “Instantaneous neural processing of communicative functions conveyed by speech prosody.” Cerebral Cortex 32: 4885–4901.
Trivers, Robert L. 1971. “The evolution of reciprocal altruism.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 46: 35–57.
Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trott, Sean, Stefanie Reed, Dan Kaliblotzky, Victor Ferreira and Benjamin Bergen. 2023. “The role of prosody in disambiguating English indirect requests.” Language and Speech 66: 118–142.
Van Ackeren, Markus J., Daniel Casasanto, Harold Bekkering, Peter Hagoort and Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer. 2012. “Pragmatics in action: Indirect requests engage theory of mind areas and the cortical motor network.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24: 2237–2247.
Vanderveken, Daniel. 1990. Meaning and Speech Acts, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vásquez, Camila. 2011. “Complaints online: The case of TripAdvisor.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1707–1717.
Walker, Traci. 2013. “Requests.” In Handbook of Pragmatics: Pragmatics of Speech Actions, ed. by Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner, 445–466. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Zinken, Jörg. 2016. Requesting Responsibility: The Morality of Grammar in Polish and English Family Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.