Narrative illocutionary acts direct and indirect

Construction of Illocutionary Speech Meaning: Analyses of Conversational Narratives of a Chinese 60-year-old Woman

“…(2) Conversational stories are performed with different kinds of illocutionary speech act functions not just to state or illustrate an affair or a point, but also with illocutionary forces both directly and indirectly in apologizing, requesting and rejecting, even indirectly in declarations, which has gained opposite ideas from Norrick's (2015) claim in the denying of this function in conversational stories. Yet this case study does not find the instance story in functioning as commissives, which are directed toward to future action, whereby narratives are mostly concerned with past experiences and events.…”

“…Taking from an outside-in approach, the collected natural data will illustrate what people accomplish in telling stories and at what effects they have made in speech events. As Norrick's (2015) taking of an outside-in approach to conversational stories, we find M's story functioning not to just entertain or to illustrate a point, but with illocutionary forces like confessing and indicting, even apologizing and warning. But if taken for the different culturally defined Chinese conversational narratives, the stories seem to fulfill either direct or indirect illocutionary speech act, and sometimes, it is beaming with both direct and indirect speech meanings in a complete narrative.…”

“…Tsiplakou and Floros (2013) concerns with the textual (illocutionary) forces such as instructing and entertaining for narrative texts like fables and jokes, but it goes on to consider both direct and indirect forces, illustrating from Searle(1975). Norrick (2015) takes an outside-in approach to study what speakers accomplish in telling stories in interaction. He believes that stories are not just to entertain or to illustrate a point.…”

“…The last decade has seen a vast research rise in studies on illocutionary speech acts in different languages and also in cross-linguistic or cross-cultural settings (see Holtgraves and Ashley, 2001;Kazuyoshi, 2009;Liu, 2011;Norrick, 2015). In line with this research trend, researchers have widely extended their fields in various pragmatic, discourse analytic and sociolinguistic studies.…”

“…However, concerning of the illocutionary acts in conversational narratives, the research is far from adequate. A complete pragmatic method of narrative could adopt both an outside-in approach to functions of narrative in context, looking at what we accomplish in telling stories and at what effects pragmatics have in speech events; and an inside-out approach, looking at how recurrent units function within narratives (Norrick, 2015). This case study, uses 4 recording transcriptions as the main data from an outside-in perspective, aiming to investigate the different illocutionary forces expressed by a 60-year-old woman and to seek whether there are any illocutionary differences between familiar people and strangers conveyed from her stories.…”