From Utterances to Speech Acts

Abstract

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.

Exploring Digital Conversation Corpora with Process Mining

“…In the end, empirical research may turn out to be useful for the development of speech act theory itself (Sbisà 2002a, b), by defining some typicality conditions (Violi 2001) for speech act sequences, existing next to formal felicity conditions for individual utterances, and possibly interacting with them. Such results may permit to better understand how speech acts are recognized within interactional contexts and build up complex conversational aims (Geis 1995;Kissine 2013). …”

“…Speech acts are generic (corpusindependent) and not related to any particular topic of conversation, discourse genre or other specific situation of verbal production. They account for the ''overt aim'' of the speaker's act (Strawson 1964;Kissine 2013). The overt speaker's aim is the pragmatic level of description at which meaning is attributed to linguistic production in real-world contexts, by referring to the mutual understanding of communicative intentions.…”

“…More generally speaking, we could cite Kissine (2013) and differentiate illocutionary (or 'transactional') conversational aims and other interactional ones. Now, our classification only takes into account illocutionary forces, but we asked the annotators to more generically identify the sentences' conversational aims.…”

5. Speech act classifications

“…Since it is not in S's interest to be rejected from further interaction, she will attempt to avoid that A should revise her belief. Hence, S has a reason for keeping her promise which is independent from the beliefs and desires she had at the time of utterance (see Kissine 2008aKissine , 2013.…”

“…But even such a modest enterprise is unlikely to succeed. Many literal and direct utterances of imperative sentences do not correspond to the performance of directive speech acts; many interrogative ones are not used to ask questions; and many indicative sentences, as literal and direct as they can be, do not constitute assertive speech acts (see Wilson and Sperber 1988;Dominicy and Franken 2002;Fiengo 2007;Kissine 2013). As cogently argued by Fiengo (2007), the conventional meanings of sentence types must be carefully distinguished from facts about their use.…”