Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T18:31:32.733Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
Series:   Elements in Pragmatics

Speech Acts

Discursive, Multimodal, Diachronic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2024

Andreas H. Jucker
Andreas H. Jucker
Affiliation:
University of Zurich

Summary

This Element outlines current issues in the study of speech acts. It starts with a brief outline of four waves of speech act theory, that is, the philosophical, the experimental, the corpus-based and the discursive approaches. It looks at some of the early experimental and corpus-based methods and discusses their more recent developments as a background to the most important trends in current speech act research. Discursive approaches shift the focus from single utterances to interaction and interactional sequences. Multimodal approaches show that the notion of 'speech act' needs to be extended in order to cover the multimodality of communicative acts. And diachronic approaches focus on the historicity of speech acts. The final section discusses some open issues and potential further developments of speech act research.
Get access

Keywords

speech actsresearch methodsdiscursive analysismultimodalitydiachrony
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in Pragmatics
Online ISBN: 9781009421461
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 24 October 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aijmer, Karin. (1996). Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Anchimbe, Eric A. (2018). Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World Englishes. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 298). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnovick, Leslie K. (1999). Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 68). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Assimakopoulos, Stavros. (in press). Speech Acts: Linguistic and Social Perspectives. (Cambridge Elements). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and House, Juliane. (1989). Cross-cultural and situational variation in requesting behavior. In Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane and Kasper, Gabriele (eds.). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 123–154.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane and Kasper, Gabriele, (eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. (2023). Pragmatics in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penelope, Brown and Levinson, Stephen C.. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody and Haugh, Michael. (2011). Evaluations of im/politeness of an intercultural apology. Intercultural Pragmatics 8.3, 411–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Claridge, Claudia and Arnovick, Leslie. (2010). Pragmaticalisation and discursisation. In Andreas, H. Jucker and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Historical Pragmatics. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 8). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 165–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Selting, Margret. (2018). Interactional Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Archer, Dawn. (2008). Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play texts, 1640–1760. In Andreas, H. Jucker and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 45–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Haugh, Michael. (2014). Pragmatics and the English Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deutschmann, Mats. (2003). Apologising in British English. (Skrifter från moderna språk 10). Umeå: Institutionen för Moderna språk, Umeå University.Google Scholar
Fang, Xianming. (2023). Multimodality in refusals in English as a lingua franca. In Andreas, H. Jucker, Iris, Hübscher and Lucien, Brown (eds.). Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, Spoken, Written. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 333). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 101–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. (2015). The Language of Service Encounters: A Pragmatic-Discursive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. (2018). Role plays. In Andreas, H. Jucker, P. Schneider, Klaus and Bublitz, Wolfram (eds.). Methods in Pragmatics. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 10). Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 305–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Georgia M. (1989). Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael. (2015). Im/Politeness Implicatures. (Mouton Series in Pragmatics). Berlin: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael. (2018). Corpus-based metapragmatics. In H. Jucker, Andreas, P. Schneider, Klaus and Bublitz, Wolfram (eds.). Methods in Pragmatics. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 10). Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 619–643.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael and Chang, Wei-Lin Melody. (2019). ‘The apology seemed (in)sincere’: Variability in perceptions of (im)politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 142, 207–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. (1984). Modifying illocutionary force. Journal of Pragmatics 8, 345–365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. (1988). Paying compliments: A sex preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics 12.4, 445–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. (1990). Apologies in New Zealand English. Language in Society 19.2, 155–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. (1995). Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Juliane, House, Kádár, Dániel Z, Liu, Fengguang and Shi, Wenrui. (2023). Historical language use in Europe from a contrastive pragmatic perspective: An exploratory case study of letter closings. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24.1, 143–159.Google Scholar
Hübscher, Iris, Sánchez-Conde, Cristina, Borràs-Comes, Joan, Vincze, Laura and Prieto, Pilar. (2023). Multimodal mitigation: How facial and body cues index politeness in Catalan requests. Journal of Politeness Research 19.1, 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreas, Jacobs and Jucker, Andreas H.. (1995). The historical perspective in pragmatics. In Andreas, H. Jucker (ed.). Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 35). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 3–33.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. (2018). Apologies in the history of English: Evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Corpus Pragmatics 2.4, 375–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. (2019). Speech act attenuation in the history of English: The case of apologies. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4.1, 45, 1–25.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. (2023). ‘He offered an apologetic smile.’ The politeness of apologetic gestures. In Andreas, H. Jucker, Hübscher, Iris and Brown, Lucien (eds.). Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, Spoken, Written. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 333). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 327–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. (in press). ‘Is that a request or a command?’ Speech act meta discourse and illocutionary indeterminacy. In Fischer, Niklas, Oswald, Steve, Schindler, Kilian and Straub, Julia (eds.). Trust and Uncertainty: Perspectives from Linguistics and Literary Studies. (SPELL 44). Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Landert, Daniela. (2015). Historical pragmatics and early speech recordings: Diachronic developments in turn-taking and narrative structure in radio talk shows. Journal of Pragmatics 79, 22–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., Schneider, Gerold, Taavitsainen, Irma and Breustedt, Barb. (2008). Fishing for compliments: Precision and recall in corpus-linguistic compliment research. In Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 273–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Smith, Sara W.. (2003). Reference assignment as a communicative task: Differences between native speakers, ESL- and EFL-speakers. In Mengel, Ewald, Schmid, Hans-Jörg and Steppat, Michael (eds.). Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth. Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, pp. 401–410.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H., Smith, Sara W. and Lüdge, Tanja. (2003). Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 35, 1737–1769.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Staley, Larssyn. (2017). (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In Culpeper, Jonathan, Haugh, Michael and Kádár, Dániel (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness. London: Palgrave, pp. 403–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Taavitsainen, Irma. (2008). Apologies in the history of English: Routinized and lexicalized expressions of responsibility and regret. In Andreas, H. Jucker and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 229–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Taavitsainen, Irma. (2013). English Historical Pragmatics. (Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Taavitsainen, Irma. (2014). Complimenting in the history of American English: A metacommunicative expression analysis. In Irma, Taavitsainen, Andreas, H. Jucker and Jukka, Tuominen (eds.). Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 243). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 257–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendon, Adam. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendon, Adam. (2017). Pragmatic functions of gestures: Some observations on the history of their study and their nature. Gesture 16.2, 157–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas (2007). Text types and the methodology of diachronic speech act analysis. In Susan, M. Fitzmaurice and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Methodological Issues in Historical Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 139–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas. (2008). Tracing directives through text and time: Towards a methodology of a corpus-based diachronic speech-act analysis. In Andreas, H. Jucker and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 295–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas. (2015). Speech acts: A diachronic perspective. In Aijmer, Karin and Rühlemann, Christoph (eds.). Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–83.Google Scholar
Kohnen, Thomas. (2017). Non-canonical speech acts in the history of English. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 65.3, 303–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daniela, Landert, Dayter, Daria, Messerli, Thomas C. and Locher, Miriam A.. (2023). Corpus Pragmatics. (Cambridge Elements). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. (2015). Speech acts. In Huang, Yan (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 199–216.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A. and Jucker, Andreas H.. (2021). The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manes, Joan and Wolfson., Nessa (1981). The compliment formula. In Coulmas, Florian, (ed.). Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 115–132.Google Scholar
Mascuñana, Evelyn F., Myla, June T. Patron, Caturay, Warlito S. Jr and B. Duran, Hermiesela. (2019). Compliment responses by college male and female Filipino second language learners of English. Corpus Pragmatics 3: 67–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, David. (2005). Gesture and Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, David. (2012). How Language Began: Gesture and Speech in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNeill, David. (2015). Why We Gesture: The Surprising Role of Hand Movements in Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Cornelia, Cienki, Alan, Fricke, Ellen, Ladewig, Silva H., McNeill, David and Teßendorf, Sedinha (eds.). (2013). Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Volume 1 (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.1). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia, Cienki, Alan, Fricke, Ellen, Ladewig, Silva H., McNeill, David and Bressem, Jana (eds.). (2014). Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Volume 2 (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 38.2). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Murphy, James. (2019). ‘I’m sorry you are such an arsehole’: (Non-)canonical apologies and their implications for (im)politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 142, 223–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nilsson, Jenny, Lindström, Jan, Bohman, Love, Norrby, Catrin, Skogmyr Marian, Klara and Wide, Camilla. (2022). Pragmatic variation across geographical and social space. In Andreas, H. Jucker and Heiko, Hausendorf (eds.). Pragmatics of Space. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 14). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 611–635.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Keeffe, Anne. (2018). Corpus-based function-to-form approaches. In Andreas, H. Jucker, P. Schneider, Klaus and Bublitz, Wolfram (eds.). Methods in Pragmatics (Handbooks of Pragmatics 10). Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 587–618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogierman, Eva. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In Andreas, H. Jucker, P. Schneider, Klaus and Bublitz, Wolfram (eds.). Methods in Pragmatics (Handbooks of Pragmatics 10). Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 229–255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reber, Elisabeth. (2021). Quoting in Parliamentary Question Time: Exploring Recent Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elisabeth, Reber and Jucker, Andreas H. (eds.). (2023). Journal of Pragmatics. VSI Diachronic Pragmatics: Perspectives on Spoken English. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-pragmatics/special-issue/10DMQ1HQP05Google Scholar
Rieger, Caroline L. (2017). ‘I want a real apology’: A discursive pragmatic perspective on apologies. Pragmatics 274, 553–590.Google Scholar
Rüegg, Larssyn. (2014). Thanks responses in three socio-economic settings: A variational pragmatics approach. Journal of Pragmatics 71, 17–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Klaus P. (2011). Imagining conversation: How people think people do things with words. Sociolinguistic Studies 5.1, 15–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Klaus P. (2017). Is that a threat? Forms and functions of metapragmatic terms in English discourse. AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 42.2, 225–242.Google Scholar
Schneider, Klaus P. (2021). Notes on variational metapragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 179, 12–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Klaus P. (2022). Referring to speech acts in communication: Exploring meta-illocutionary expressions in ICE-Ireland. Corpus Pragmatics 6, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoppa, Dominik Jan. (2022). Conceptualizing illocutions in context: A variationist perspective on the meta-illocutionary lexicon. Corpus Pragmatics 6, 63–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. (1979). Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staley, Larssyn. (2018). Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation: Speech Acts and Address Forms in Context. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 291). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Strubel-Burgdorf, Susanne. (2018). Compliments and Positive Assessments: Sequential Organization in Multi-party Conversations. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 289). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Szatrowski, Polly E. (2014). Modality and evidentiality in Japanese and American English taster lunches: Identifying and assessing an unfamiliar drink. In Polly Szatrowski, E. (ed.). Language and Food: Verbal and Nonverbal Experiences. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 238). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 131–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irma, Taavitsainen and Jucker, Andreas H.. (2008). ‘Methinks you seem more beautiful than ever’: Compliments and gender in the history of English. In Andreas, H. Jucker and Irma, Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English. (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 195–228.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma and Włodarczyk, Matylda. (2021). Contrastive pragmatics in a diachronic perspective: Insights from Othello. Contrastive Pragmatics, 168–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (1991) English speech act verbs: A historical perspective. In Linda, R. Waugh and Stephen, Rudy (eds.). New Vistas in Grammar: Invariance and Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 387–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (2008). The state of English language studies: A linguistic perspective. In Thormählen, Marianne (ed.). English Now: Selected Papers from the 20th IAUPE Conference in Lund 2007. Lund: Lund Studies in English, pp. 199–225.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Dasher, Richard B.. (2005). Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trosborg, Anna. (1995). Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verschueren, Jef. (1985). What People Say They Do with Words: Prolegomena to an Empirical-Conceptual Approach to Linguistic Action. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Verschueren, Jef. (1994). Speech act verbs. In Asher, R. E. and Simpson, J. M. Y. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Volume 8. Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 4138–4140.Google Scholar
Williams, Graham. (2018). Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Speech Acts
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Speech Acts
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Speech Acts
Available formats
×