Is Sybil there? the structure of some American English directives

Abstract

Directives to hearers can be expressed in a variety of syntactic forms. The social distribution of such forms shows them to occur systematically, according to familiarity, rank, territorial location, difficulty of task, whether or not a duty is normally expected, whether or not non-compliance is likely. Except for some hints and questions not mentioning what is desired, directives do not require inference from a prior literal interpretation to be understood. Indeed, misunderstandings and puns imply that the interpretation of many directives is not likely to include a literal phase. On the contrary, where knowledge of obligations and prohibitions is shared, simple interpretation rules suffice, allowing prompt understanding. To interpret the affective significance of directives, one must compare the expected and realized forms, and recognize the social features that the difference implies. Deference, solidarity, coldness, sarcasm, rudeness, and qualitatively specified compliments or insults can be communicated systematically by such departures. (Pragmatics, directives, requests, politeness, conversational analysis, performatives, US English.)

Pretty Is As Pretty Does: A Speech Act View of Sex Roles

“…For applied linguists concerned with language acquisition and with intercultur al communicati on, the insights gained through analysis of the social aspects of language use are of particular importance. Recent studies of such speech acts as apologies (Cohen and Olshtain 1981, Olshtain 1983, Olshtain and Cohen 1983, directives (Ervin-Tripp 1976, Blum-Kulka 1982 In earlier work on the analysis of complimentin g behavior among middle-clas s Americans (Manes and, it was demonstrate d that there exists a considerabl e (and previously unsuspected) amount of patterning both at the syntactic and the semantic levels. Examination of a corpus of approximate ly seven hundred examples of compliments uttered"in day-to-day interaction s and collected ethnographically , revealed that the spontaneity with which they are often associated is linked more to their freedom of occurrence within an <inter-action than to any originality in structure or lexicon.…”

“…For applied linguists concerned with language acquisition and with intercultur al communicati on, the insights gained through analysis of the social aspects of language use are of particular importance. Recent studies of such speech acts as apologies (Cohen and Olshtain 1981, Olshtain 1983, Olshtain and Cohen 1983, directives (Ervin-Tripp 1976, Blum-Kulka 1982, expressions of disapproval (d'fl.mico-Re isner 1983), and compliments , Wolfson and Manes 198D, Manes 1983, Wolfson 1981) have rich implication s. It has been demonstrated again and again that beneath the surface structure of the linguistic forms and the social etiquette invalved in their use, lies a gold mine of information about the value systems of speakers. In studying apologies, for example, we learn what constitutes an offense, and in studying compliments we learn about what speakers value.…”

Balanced incomplete blocks to control individual differences

“…The subjects were asked to rate each request on three 5-point Likert-type scales: powerfulweak, rude-polite, and humble-arrogant. Previous research (Becker, 1982(Becker, , 1986Ervin-Tripp, 1976) demonstrated that speakers tendto address moreexplicit requests to lower status listenersand more ambiguous requeststo higherstatuslisteners, and that listenerstend to judge explicitrequests as rudeandjudgemore ambiguous requests as polite. Beckeret al were interestedin the interactive effects of speaker status and request form on listeners' judgments of requests, particularly when the request forms were not those typically used by speakers of particular statuses.…”

Memory for the form and force of declaratives and interrogatives

“…"), Each of these ways of indirectly requesting the salt exploits a different condition for the felicitous performance of a request; they differ in their syntactic form (i.e., dec1aratives vs. interrogatives) and propositional content (i.e., the hearer's salt-passing abilities vs. the speaker's wishes). Ervin-Tripp (1976) and Lakoff (1977) have suggested that cultural conventions determine the form of speech acts. The acceptability of "Pass the salt," "I would like some salt," and "Could you pass the salt?"…”