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CHARACTERISTICS OF SPEECH ACTS
Syntactic structures
Verbs
Speech act verbs or perfonnatives are used e.g. request, command, beg, etc. In
other words, it is the verbs that make the speech act happen. These verbs are always in
the present tense:
I command you to stop.
In a command like:
Stopl
it appears as if there is no perfonnative, but it is there in a higher level
sentence:
I command you to stop.
Ifthe conversational situation is clear enough conversational verbs need not be
used. "Speech-acts are metaphorically treated as exchange or transfer of objects from
one interlocutor to the other; the objects are linguistic fonns, which are containers for
meaning." (Sweetser 1990:20.)
In the discussion on modality it was noticed that the same modal verbs can be
applied to both the real and epistemic world because they are believed to be having a
parallel force-dynamic structure. Other parts ofthe English lexicon are believed to have
the same ambiguity although they may not have been previously analysed to be parallel
to the modal verbs.
Sweetser (1990:69) makes an example of the verb insist as illustrated by
Tregidgo (1982) where there is a speech act involving the speaker's interaction in a real
world:
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