Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

466 Part 6: Language and Interaction
(Bilmes, 1986) and discursive psychology (Edwards, 1997). In psychology,
applied linguistics and speech-act-based cross-cultural pragmatics, it was
John Searle’s cognitivist version of speech act theory (especially Searle,
1969, 1976) that garnered the most uptake. Building on Grice’s (1957)
theory of meaning, Searle (1969) defi nes illocutionary acts, the core object
of his theory, as categories of speaker’s intentions expressed by means of
conventionalized language forms. Whereas for Austin, illocutionary force
is complemented by ‘perlocution’, the effect of the utterance on the hearer,
Searle’s version eliminates the intrinsically sequential and interactional
makeup of speech acts. 5 Via Searle, speech act research acquired a rationalist
foundation that had decisive consequences for the theory and
methodology of cross-cultural pragmatics.
Searle’s approach to speech acts (1969) and his classifi cation of illocutionary
acts (1976) have been widely adopted as a framework to study
how cross-culturally available speech acts are confi gured with the
resources of different languages. As an empirical extension of Searle’s
theory, speech act research implicitly combines theories of meaning as
speaker intention (e.g. Grice, 1957) and linguistic convention (Bilmes,
1986; Kasper, 2006a). The convention view of meaning (Searle, 1976)
underlies the notion that speech acts are normatively performed through
particular types of utterances (‘conventions of means’, Clark, 1979), called
semantic formulae (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983) or speech act realization
strategies (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). Semantic formulae are encoded in specialized
language-specifi c resources (‘conventions of form’, Clark, 1979)
and combine to speech act sets, the collection of semantic structures by
which a particular speech act can be achieved. 6 For example, the coding
scheme developed in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project
(CCSARP) for the analysis of requests distinguishes three dimensions of
request modifi cation (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989): The directness by which
requestive meaning is indexed in the form of the ‘head act’, or request
proper (direct, conventionally indirect, nonconventionally indirect); internal
modifi cation (intensifi cation and mitigation) of the request through
lexical and syntactic forms; and external modifi cation by actions leading
up to or following the request (announcements, establishing preconditions,
accounts (‘grounders’) and others). The three dimensions are illustrated
in the following extract from an oral profi ciency interview.
Dormitory (Kasper, 2006b: 340; IR = interviewer, C = candidate)
IR: I’ve never been to the dormitories before,
so I don’t really have much idea what the
dormitory is like. Can you describe your room
to me perhaps?
C: Oh, my (.) my room (.) my room (.)
my room (.) my room is very dirty now,