Memory for illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects of utterances

Conversation, speech acts, and memory

“…A finding similar to this was reported by Schweller, Brewer, and Dahl (1976), who examined memory for a small set of utterance descriptions (rather than actual utterances). This hypothesis was tested in the present Experiments 1 through 3.…”

“…The two experiments were identical, except that conversational utterances were used in Experiment 2 and descriptions of conversational utterances were used in Experiment 1 (similar to Schweller et al, 1976). If illocutionary force is retained in long-term memory, participants should be more likely to falsely recognize a lure containing a relevant speech act verb after reading an utterance that performs that speech act than after reading an utterance that does not perform that speech act.…”

Memory for the pragmatic implications of sentences

“…The fuse on the dynamite was not long implies The fuse on the dynamite was short (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1975). The English professor told his students a dull story about Jane Austin implies The English professor bored his students with a story about Jane Austin (Schweller, Brewer, & Dahl, 1976). It is obvious that these types of inferences differ on a wide variety of dimensions; however, one way of organizing them is to distinguish between logical implication and pragmatic implication.…”

“…They all found that subjects made false recognition responses to the logical implications of the original sentences. The study by Johnson et al (1973) and the experiment dealing with perlocutionary speech acts by Schweller et al (1976) used pragmatic implications and recognition memory procedures. Both of these studies found that subjects made false recognition responses to the pragmatic implications of the original sentences.…”

“…Most of the findings that have been interpreted as examples of pragmatic implication were taken from studies that were directed at slightly different issues, and so used somewhat narrow types of pragmatic implications, such as perlocutionary speech acts (Schweller et al, 1976), factive and nonfactive verbs (Harris, 1974), instruments and consequences (Johnson et al, 1973), sentences with continuous and dichotomous antonyms (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1975). In addition, there has been a general reliance on recognition memory tasks.…”