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Article published In:
Pragmatics and its Interfaces as related to the Expression of Intention
Edited by István Kecskés
[Pragmatics & Cognition 26:1] 2019
► pp. 61–84

What is an indirect speech act?

Reconsidering the literal force hypothesis

| Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

The notion of an indirect speech act is at the very heart of cognitive pragmatics, yet, after nearly 50 years of orthodox (Searlean) speech act theory, it remains largely unclear how this notion can be explicated in a proper way. In recent years, two debates about indirect speech acts have stood out. First, a debate about the Searlean idea that indirect speech acts constitute a simultaneous realization of a secondary and a primary act. Second, a debate about the reasons for the use of indirect speech acts, in particular about whether this reason is to be seen in strategic advantages and/or observation of politeness demands. In these debates, the original pragmatic conception of sentence types as indicators of illocutionary force seems to have been getting lost. Here, I go back to the seemingly outdated “literal force hypothesis” (see Levinson 1983: 263–264) and point out how it is still relevant for cognitive pragmatics.

Keywords: context, conventionalization, direct speech act, explicit performative, implicature, indirect speech act, literal force hypothesis, politeness, strategic speaker
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Non-neutral contexts
  • 3.Simultaneous realization of two speech acts
    • Type I
    • Type II
    • Type III
  • 4.Conventionalization
  • 5.Strategic speakers and politeness
  • 6.Speech acts and implicatures
  • 7.Coding of speech act potential in sentence types
  • 8.The problem of explicit performatives
  • 9.Experimental evidence
  • 10.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19009.mei
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