Browsing results for Speech acts

(2007) French, Spanish – Speech acts, “secondary” verbs

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2021.

Elduayen, Luis Gastón (2007). Introduire le discours d’autrui: Actes de parole et verbes “secondaires” dans la presse franco-espagnole [Introducing other people’s discourse: Speech acts and “secondary” verbs in the French-Spanish press]. Revista española de lingüística aplicada, 20, 37-58. PDF (open access)

Is it necessary to recall that it is ultimately through the speech acts generated by verba dicendi that reported speech is introduced, clarified, even explicated, and that readers are placed on the path of good reception? With public life being nothing short of an immense interlocutional labyrinth, the importance of the words spoken and reported by the written press (in this case the French-Spanish written press), on the one hand, and that of the “relating” verbs, on the other, comes into even sharper focus. The object of this analysis, which is fundamentally semantic, will be this class of “secondary” items – secondary by reason of their frequency. It is a class that, at times, may even include collateral items, i.e. items which, precisely because of their function, belong to the said class but whose semantics is often unrelated to it.

(2008) English, Korean – Speech acts

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on December 8, 2019.

Kim, Heesoo (2008). The semantic and pragmatic analysis of South Korean and Australian English apology speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 257-278.

DOI: https://doi.org.10.1016/j.pragma.2007.11.003

Abstract:

The aim of this study is to undertake a semantic and pragmatic analysis of South Korean apology speech acts, in particular with respect to how South Korean apologetic speech act expressions differ conceptually from Australian English expressions of apology. NSM is used to clarify how the main South Korean apologetic speech act expression mianhada differs conceptually from Australian English sorry; in the process, some distinctive features of South Korean culture are illustrated. South Korean apology speech act strategies are investigated in seven situations; this investigation is modeled on the work of Blum-Kulka and collaborators.

The findings of this study are that the attitudinal meanings of mianhada and sorry, as well as the range of illocutionary acts associated with the two expressions, are different. Decomposing mianhada and sorry into their illocutionary components provides a fine-grained description of what are assumed to be the attitudes and states of mind of South Koreans and Australians, respectively, when performing an apology. The study further suggests that conceptualizing speech act expressions through the use of semantically simple words may help second language learners acquire the proper ways of carrying out speech acts (including non-verbal expressions) in the target language and culture.

More information:

For a different analysis, see:

Yu, Kyong-Ae (2017). Perceptions and functions of Korean mianhada: comparison with American English sorry. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 25(2), 197-224.

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(2009) Polish – Emotions, speech acts, motion verbs, animal names

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 22, 2018.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2009). The theory of the mental lexicon. In Sebastian Kempgen, Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, & Karl Gutschmidt (Eds.), Die slavischen Sprachen/The Slavic languages: Eine internationales Handbuch zu ihrer Struktur, ihrer Geschichte und ihrer Erforsching/An international handbook of their structure, their history and their investigation: Volume 1 (pp. 848-863). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI : https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110214475.1.11.848

The main thesis of this article is that (contrary to what, for example, Chomsky claims) a great deal is by now known about the mental lexicon. First of all, there is currently a great deal of evidence that at the heart of this lexicon lies a set of sixty or so universal semantic primes, each with its own set of combinatory characteristics. Second, cross-linguistic evidence suggests that large sections of the mental lexicon have a hierarchical structure, with several levels of semantic molecules operating and thus allowing for great conceptual complexity to be combined with relatively simple semantic structures. Third, it is now clear that many sections of the mental lexicon are organized according to a certain pattern, or template, shared by a large number of words. Fourth, a large body of research has shown that the mental lexicon of the speakers of any given language includes many words whose meanings are unique to that particular language, and that such words – a language’s cultural key words – help bind the speakers of a language into a cohesive cultural community.

The chapter focuses in particular on the relatively new areas of semantic molecules and semantic templates. The illustrative material analysed is drawn from Polish and relates to emotions (including but not limited to emotions reminiscent of envy and compassion in English), speech acts (reminiscent of to order and to ask (someone about something) in English), names of animals (mice), and motion verbs.


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(2011) English, Turkish – Speech acts

Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on June 16, 2020.

Can, Hümeyra (2011). A cross-cultural study of the speech act of congratulation in British English and Turkish using a corpus approach. MA thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

PDF: Open access

Abstract:

This study aims to find out the culturally different conceptualizations of congratulation in British culture and tebrik and kutlama in Turkish culture using a corpus approach and to formulate cultural scripts for these three performative verbs using the NSM approach. More specifically, the study aims to reveal the contexts where the target speech act is used and to uncover the kinds of strategies/components employed in these situations.

To be able to collect the targeted data, the study begins with the monolingual and bilingual dictionary definitions of the performative verbs (i.e., congratulate, tebrik etmek and kutlamak) and then follows a corpus approach whereby the performative verbs and their various lexical forms are searched for in various corpora (i.e., BYU-BNC, MTC, Google). In total, 47 dictionaries are looked up and 442 contexts of congratulation, 339 contexts of tebrik and 348 contexts of kutlama are collected from the newspaper and blog genres in the three corpora. The analyses of the data aim to uncover the qualitative and quantitative features of congratulation, tebrik and kutlama in British and Turkish cultures.

The results of the study show that there are some cultural differences as well as similarities in the conceptualization of the speech act of congratulation in terms of its contexts of use and strategies. The findings also demonstrate the usefulness of the corpus approach in studying speech acts and their conceptualization.


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(2011) Russian – Arguing

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2011). Arguing in Russian: Why Solzhenitsyn’s fictional arguments defy translation. Russian Journal of Communication, 4(1/2), 8-37.

This paper discusses patterns of ‘arguing’ which prevails in Russian speech culture and shows that they differ profoundly from those characteristic of modern Anglo culture(s). The author focuses on the extended arguments (spory) in Solzhenitsyn’s novel ‘In the First Circle’ and shows that many linguistic and cultural aspects of the original are lost in the English translation. She argues that this was inevitable because English doesn’t have and “doesn’t need” linguistic resources to render various aspects of Russian communicative practices, which are culture-specific and have no counterparts in Anglophone
culture(s). The paper shows too that the techniques of semantic analysis developed in the “NSM” approach to cultural semantics help explain why Solzhenitsyn’s fictional arguments defy translation, and more generally, how they can be used to identify some deep differences between Russian and Anglo
speech cultures and communicative norms.

(2012) English (Australia) – Negative personal descriptors, jocular speech act verbs

Published on August 7, 2017. Last updated on September 9, 2018.

Rowen, Roslyn (2012). “Shit bloke! You’re always geeing me up like that”: A lexical semantic analysis of negative personal descriptors and “jocular” speech-act verbs in informal Australian English. BA (Hons) thesis, Griffith University.

This thesis explores the meaning and social functions of eight negative personal descriptors (asshole, crumb, shit bloke, wanker, wuss, nark, shit-stirrer, bogan) and four “jocular” speech act verbs (joke, tease, stir (up), gee up) in the colloquial Australian English spoken in Brisbane and surrounding areas. Data on usage comes from a corpus of recordings of informal interaction in natural settings. The method of semantic analysis is reductive paraphrase, using the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach.

There has been little lexical-semantic research on colloquial “social” terms in contemporary Australian English and this study contributes to filling this gap. In addition, there is a cultural angle. It is widely held that culture fosters new schools of thought and as such that language can be seen as a vessel for conveying the social realities and beliefs of a particular culture, including the mainstream “Anglo Australian” culture. Not all linguists agree, however, arguing, for example, that Australian English does not have a unique or distinct culture. Examining specifically Australian English words, especially colloquial ones, and how they are used in social interaction, can shed light on this issue. The thesis argues that the meanings and uses of these words correlate with cultural values and attitudes that are specific to Australian English.


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(2015) Irish English – Speech act verbs (opinions)

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 9, 2018.

Gąsior, Weronika (2015). Cultural scripts and the speech act of opinions in Irish English: A study amongst Irish and Polish university students. ELOPE (English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries), 12(1), 11-28. DOI: 10.4312/elope.12.1.11-28. PDF (open access)

Studies in pragmatics have been limited to a handful of illocutionary acts such as requests, apologies or compliments, and opinions remain underrepresented in the existing literature. In this paper I present the results of a study of opinions in Irish English, conducted in an intercultural environment of Irish-Polish interactions. Departing from a traditional approach of speech act realisation studies, I applied the theory of cultural scripts to analyse opinions. In contrasting the Irish and Polish formulas for expressing opinions, as well as sociopragmatic attitudes towards this speech act, a difference in the cultural scripts for opinions in each culture was observable. Apart from already documented Polish frankness in opinions, the study discovered also a rational approach to presenting good arguments to support one’s assertions among the participants. In relation to the Irish script for opinions, the findings are in line with previous classifications of opinions in Australian English, showing a certain level of variational uniformity amongst the English-speaking cultures in this regard.


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(2016) Bislama, English, Danish – Speech acts: lies

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.

Levisen, Carsten (2016). The ethnopragmatics of speech acts in postcolonial discourse: “Truth” and “trickery” in a transculturated South Pacific tale. In Christoph Schubert & Laurenz Volkmann (Eds.), Pragmatic perspectives on postcolonial discourse: Linguistics and literature (pp. 41-64). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Abstract:

Providing a high-resolution explication of the Bislama (Vanuatu, South Pacific) speech act word giaman, from colonial English gammon (“to humbug”), the paper develops an ethnopragmatic profile of the speech act category “truth/lies/deception” and discusses the interpretative potential for a giaman-based interpretation of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s most cherished fairy tales, The Emperor’s New Clothes, which has now also been translated into Bislama. Demonstrating how giaman differs from European-type speech acts, and in particular from English and Danish semi-counterparts of the word (respectively lie and bedrage), the paper launches into a postcolonial critique of Anglo-international pragmatics and its so-called universal maxims and speech acts, showing a new way and a new synthesis called postcolonial ethnopragmatics.

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(2016) Montenegrin – Speech act verbs (apologies)

Published on September 8, 2018. Last updated on September 9, 2018.

Perović, Slavica (2016). Apologising and the Montenegrin cultural script. Logos et Littera, 1(3), pp. 1-24. PDF (open access)

The paper deals with the representation of the speech act of apology through cultural scripts. The research has been done on a corpus of students’ responses gathered through an interview of the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) type. The speech act of apology is analysed within the politeness theory originated by Brown and Levinson (1987) and the category of ‘face’. The complexity and specificity of this speech act in Montenegrin leads us to establish six semantic components of apologizing for which we devise cultural scripts. Furthermore, two broad categories of apologies are identified: non-verbal and verbal. These are labelled ‘to do is to say’ and ‘to say is to do’, respectively, and give rise to do master scripts. The analysis in this paper relies on the idea of cultural scripts developed by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard, executed through the semantic primes of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM).


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(2016) Speech act verbs

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 9, 2018.

Wong, Jock (2016). A critical look at the description of speech acts. In Alessandro Capone, & Jacob L. Mey (Eds.), Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society (pp. 825-855). Cham: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_32

For John Searle, philosophy of language was the attempt to come up with philosophically illuminating descriptions of some of the general features of language. It was to concern itself only incidentally with particular elements in a particular language. The problem is that understanding the general features of language requires a metalanguage that contains general features of language; a metalanguage that contains particular elements associated with particular languages (or, in other words, an ethnocentric metalanguage) does not fit the bill. Yet, this is precisely how the study of speech acts, which originally came under the ambit of language philosophy, is often conducted – with an ethnocentric metalanguage. It seems paradoxical that while scholars who study speech acts directly or indirectly engage in the pursuit of language universals, the metalanguage they use often effectively prevents them from reaching that goal.

This chapter argues that, if we want to fruitfully study speech acts in world languages, we should employ an analytical tool that is minimally ethnocentric, such as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It helps us recognize speech acts from any language, even if there is no English word for them, and it allows us to understand them from the inside.

This chapter also argues that we should refrain from “comparing” speech acts by asking how people in various cultures perform the same speech act because this would necessitate the use of a language-specific speech act verb (e.g., request, apologize). A more fruitful way might be to formulate a generic situation using NSM and ask how people in various cultures respond in/to that situation.


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(2017) English, Arabic – Speech acts: requests, apologies

Published on August 26, 2018. Last updated on September 12, 2018.

Dendenne, Boudjemaa (2017). A cross-cultural study of speech act realisations in Arabic and English: A cultural-scripts approach. Revue académique des études humaines et sociales, Series B: Littérature et Philosophie, 18, 3-15. PDF (Researchgate)

This paper reports on the findings of a cross-cultural pragmatic study into the realization of two speech acts that are common in Arabic and English, namely requests and apologies. Natural Semantic Metalanguage and cultural scripts have been employed for this purpose. The usefulness of the adopted approach lies in the fact that it describes norms, behaviours and cultural meanings in a particular language/culture in a way that is accessible to both insiders and outsiders. Cross-cultural education and intercultural communication both stand to benefit from such an approach.

The ultimate goal behind the use of NSM and cultural scripts is to reduce cultural misunderstandings and conflicts. The author strongly recommends adoption of these tools to re-describe and re-explicate findings that are regarded as empirically well founded in previous cross-cultural studies.


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(2017) English, Korean – Speech acts

Published on December 8, 2019. Last updated on December 8, 2019.

Yu, Kyong-Ae (2017). Perceptions and functions of Korean mianhada: comparison with American English sorry. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 25(2), 197-224.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.14353/sjk.2017.25.2.07 / Open access

Abstract:

Sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic conventions for apology vary from culture to culture. While the illocutionary purpose of apologizing in English is the speaker’s sense of social obligation and Japanese sumimasen involves social-self with a social alter, this study argues that Korean mianhada is an apology from the speaker’s moral perspective linked with collective-self. Employing NSM, this study discusses that sorry is a separate concept but mianhada is a nebulous concept mixed with other emotions, e.g., thanks and love. In addition, presenting the examples from corpus-based dictionaries, COCA, and the Sejong 21st Century Corpus, this study discusses that sorry is authentically used as indirect and ritualistic apologies while mianhada is used as direct, indirect, ritualistic and substantive apologies. Finally, distinguishing main functions of mianhada into a sincere apology, a pseudo-apology, gratitude, a request initiator, a preclosing signal, and a territory invasion signal to strangers, this study provides cultural and ethnographical explanations.

More information:

Only Kim (2008) has analysed the semantic differences in cultural perceptions between Australian sorry and Korean mianhada using NSM,  but the analysis proposed here for Korean mianhada is different.

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(2017) Javanese (Old) – Speech act verbs

Published on September 9, 2018. Last updated on September 9, 2018.

Ratna Erawati, Ni Ketut & Ngurah Sulibra, I Ketut (2017). Speech act verb in Old Javanese: Natural Semantics Metalanguage analysis. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 4(2), 71-80. PDF (open access)

Based on their semantic components, verbs in Old Javanese are classified into states, processes, and actions. Speech verbs are a subtype of the latter. In this paper, they are analysed with the help of NSM theory. Based on the analysis of the speech verbs included, we can see that  each of them reflects two important components of semantics (dictum and illocutionary purpose) that show similar overall meaning but subtle differences from one verb to another.

The speech act verbs included belong to the following general categories: ask, reply, request, tell, promise, call, scold, persuade, advise, discuss, complain, accuse, entertain, mock, berate.


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(2020) English — Evaluational adjectives

Published on January 15, 2022. Last updated on January 15, 2022.

Trnavac, Radoslava, & Taboada, Maite. (2020). Positive Appraisal in Online News Comments. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 185–206). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_10

Abstract

This chapter investigates the linguistic expression of positive evaluation in English and describes a preliminary typology of linguistic devices used for positive evaluation. Using corpus-assisted analysis, we classify some of the resources that play a role in the expression of positive evaluation into phenomena in the lexicogrammar and phenomena that belong in discourse semantics and compare those resources to the ones deployed for negative evaluation (see the work on negative evaluation in Taboada et al. in Corpus Pragmat, 1:57–76, 2017). This general classification of evaluative devices overlaps with the planes of expression in systemic functional linguistics. Our data comes from a collection of opinion articles and the comments associated with them (Kolhatkar et al., in the SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus: A corpus for the analysis of online news comments, under review). We use a set of 1000 comments previously annotated for Appraisal (Martin and White in The language of evaluation. Palgrave, New York, 2005), including labels of Attitude (Affect, Judgement, Appreciation) and polarity (positive, negative, neutral). The central component of the chapter is the analysis of the resources used by commenters to express positive evaluation. We explore whether they make use of rhetorical figures, following up on our work with Cliff Goddard on the use of rhetorical figures in the expression of negative evaluation (Taboada et al. in Corpus Pragmat, 1:57–76, 2017). We then analyse the semantics of evaluative adjectives using the natural semantic metalanguage approach and follow our previous work on templates that capture different types of adjectives and fall into five groups (Goddard et al., in Funct Lang 26, 2019). Although our corpus analysis is limited, and it includes only a specific type of data (online news comments), the phenomena that we discuss are present across different genres of texts. While our previous work has focused on how to express negative evaluation, this chapter seeks to honour Cliff Goddard and his positive influence by studying how positivity is realized in language.

 


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(2020) Persian – Ethnopragmatics

Published on August 7, 2017. Last updated on February 9, 2020.

Arab, Reza (2020). Ethnopragmatics of hāzer javābi, a valued speech practice in Persian. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 75-94). Singapore: Springer.

DOI: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_5

Abstract:

This study, the fifth chapter in the volume in which it is published, examines the speech practice designated as hāzer javābi (literally, ‘ready response’ in Persian (Farsi)) using an ethnopragmatic approach; that is, it attempts to capture the ‘insider’ understandings of the practice by making use of semantic explications and cultural scripts. It is one of only a few papers about the Persian language that employ the ethnopragmatic approach. Section 5.1 introduces the practice, offers some classical and contemporary examples, and draws attention to differences in similar-but-different speech practices in English and some other languages. Section 5.2 describes the analytical framework, i.e. ethnopragmatics. Section 5.3 provides historical and cultural contextualization, aiming both to scaffold a more precise understanding of the concept and to explain its cultural prominence. Section 5.4 presents a script for hāzer javābi. Section 5.5 discusses broader issues and provides concluding remarks.

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