Published Date: July 15th 2023
Page Length: 376
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-80053-878-8
Price: £38.50
Speech act theory is a classic research topic in linguistics. By analyzing speech act phenomenon and taking it as a starting point, we can deeply understand the concept, categorization function and non-conceptual pragmatic function in cognitive linguistics. There are several main problems in the traditional study of classical speech act theory: 1) it lacks the rationale of “words and deeds”. “Words are deeds” is the core content of classical speech act theory. However, since the formation of the classical speech act theory, there has been no research to answer the question “why 'words are deeds'”; 2) it trivializes effectiveness. Austin abstracts three kinds of acts from a complete speech act: speaking act, acting act and taking effect act. But what he talks about most is the act of service; the speech act theory after Austin also focuses entirely on the act of acting; 3) it does not give a precise definition of “illocutionary force”; 4) insufficient attention to social and cultural factors: Austin and Searle's speech act research involved relatively narrow contexts: the narrow context led to the narrow corpus scope, and their research mostly used single sentences, ignoring the corpus at the supersentence level, which did not reflect the actual situation of language use.