edging up on speech
acts
politeness
pragmatics
speech acts: utterance

A string of spoken words – you don’t intend to
communicate meaning
propositional utterance

The utterance refers to something else or
describes a real or imaginary object. It
identifies or specifies. It doesn’t have to
intend anything.
A blue car
Among speakers of English, for example, "It is raining" performs the locutionary
act of saying that it is raining, as "Grablistrod zetagflx dapu" would not.. See
www.philosophypages.com/dy/l5.htm
illocutionary utterance

Speaker intends to make contact with the
listener, to interact with the receiver
Isn’t there a blue car
in front of our
driveway
Example: ‘I’m tired’
http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/TUTOR/Relation/relate2.html
perlocutionary utterances

Attempts to affect behavior of the receiver: if
Mary’s blue car is blocking the exit, then ‘Isn’t
there a blue car
in front of our
driveway?”
(said to Mary)
could be
perlocutionary
http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/
TUTOR/Relation/relate2.html
speech act guess-me

1. You say, "For class tomorrow, please read
pages twenty-one through forty-seven."
Utterance
Propositional
Illocutionary
Perlocutionary
speech act guess-me

2. While talking to a group of friends, you
mention that you recently went to hear your
favorite band play at a local club.
Utterance
Propositional
Illocutionary
Perlocutionary
speech act guess-me
3. You and a friend are talking about a
television show that you both watched the
night before. You say, "What did you think
about Tony's reaction to Carmela's news?"
Utterance
Propositional
Illocutionary
Perlocutionary

speech act guess-me

4. When you discover that the grade you got
on your paper is an A, you let out a sigh of
relief .
Utterance
Propositional
Illocutionary
Perlocutionary
speech act guess-me

5. For the last hour you have been riding along with
your parents as they look at houses that they might
want to buy, and they have not said much to you
recently. As the car passes through a neighborhood
with a house that has a "For Sale" sign out front, you
exclaim, "Oh! There's a nice house."
Utterance
Propositional
Illocutionary
Perlocutionary
speech act guess-me
6. While sitting on a dock that sticks out into
the ocean, you see a dolphin. It surfaces
nearby and makes a series of high-pitched
sounds: "Chweee,chweee, chweee."
Utterance
Propositional
Illocutionary
Perlocutionary

Theoretical highlights



Austin: Speech Acts (Illocutionary Acts)
Bourdieu The linkages of these acts with institutions
Grice:The Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims


Goffman: Facework


Activities involved in the presentation of self
Brown and Levinson: Politeness (positive and negative face)




Helps explain implicature and variation
Types of strategies for interaction.
Leads to reaction from specialists in cultures, media: for example,
http://www.ekl.oulu.fi/MAILL/docs/finsse3.pdf
Scollon and Scollon: independence & involvement
www.msu.edu/course/anp/420/dwyer/14%20Pragmatics.ppt
Linguistic politeness research group
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/de
partments/ea/politeness/
Sponsored by
a little about JL Austin, 1911-1960
Oxford professor of philosophy. In "A Plea for Excuses"
(1956), Austin explained and illustrated his method
of approaching philosophical issues by first
patiently analyzing the subtleties of ordinary
language. In How to Do Things with Words (1961),
the transcription of Austin's James lectures at
Harvard, application of this method distinguishes
between what we say, what we mean when we say
it, and what we accomplish by saying it, or between
speech acts involving locution, illocution (or
"performative utterance"), and perlocution.
http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/aust.htm
J. L. Austin on Performatives – doing
something by saying something
The uttering of the words is .. the performance of that which is also
the object of the utterance.
Circumstances around the performative must be appropriate
1.
2.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
3.
4.
good faith v. bad faith
Other things have to go right (happy) (felicities)
Must be an accepted conventional procedure
Particular persons must be appropriate for the invocation of act
Procedure must be executed correctly and completely
Person must have those thoughts and feelings requisite of the act
Must actually conduct themselves subsequently.
Explicit (I bet, I promise, ...) v Implicit performatives (where the
performative is only a possibility (might, perhaps, (you might be
wrong)
Entails (all men blush) v. Implies v Presupposes (all Jack’s children
are bald presupposes that Jack has children.
Watch that implicature
a little about Bourdieu, 1930-2002
‘Bourdieu, who loved intellectual combat, called himself "to the left
of the left"--that is, to the left of the ossified French left-wing
parties and also to the left of the academic postmodernists aka
antifoundationalists, about whose indifference to empirical work
he was scathing. Reading him could be a disturbing experience,
because the explanatory sweep of his key concept of habitus-the formation and expression of self around an internalized and
usually accurate sense of social destiny--tends to make
ameliorative projects seem rather silly’

THE NATION February 18, 2002 issue Pierre Bourdieu, 19302002 by Katha Pollitt
Pollitt adds a little more (you might want
to look for implicature, she implied)


“Take, for example, his attack on the notion that making high
culture readily available--in free museums and local
performances--is all that is necessary to bring it to the masses.
… there is nothing automatic or natural about the ability to
"appreciate"--curious word--a Rothko or even a Van Gogh: You
have to know a lot about painting, you have to feel comfortable in
museums and you have to have what Bourdieu saw as the
educated bourgeois orientation, which rests on leisure, money
and unselfconscious social privilege and expresses itself as the
enjoyment of the speculative, the distanced, the non-useful.
Typically, though, Bourdieu used this discouraging insight to call
for more, not less, effort to make culture genuinely accessible to
all: Schools could help give working-class kids the cultural
capital--another key Bourdieusian concept--that middle-class
kids get from their families. One could extend that insight to the
American context and argue that depriving working-class kids of
the "frills"--art, music, trips--in the name of "the basics" is not just
stingy or philistine, it's a way of maintaining class privilege”
Bourdieu and Speech Acts: conditions of the
performative are all associated with the institution
1.
2.
3.

Roles:
1.
Particular persons must be appropriate for the invocation
of the act
Practices:
1.
Must be an accepted conventional procedure
2.
Must be executed correctly and completely
Other Considerations
1.
Sincerity: Person must have those thoughts and feelings
requisite of the act
2.
Consistency: Must actually conduct themselves
subsequently.
Think Donald Trump’s ‘You’re fired’
Following is adapted from www.msu.edu/course/anp/420/dwyer/14%20Pragmatics.ppt
a little bit about Grice
Herbert Paul Grice was born in 1913 and died in 1988. From the late
1930's until 1967 he held positions at Oxford University. During the
war years he served in the Royal Navy. In 1967 he moved to the
University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 1979 but continued
to teach until 1986. Grice is best known for his analysis of speaker's
meaning, his conception of conversational implicature, and his
project of intention-based semantics. Largely as a result of these
ideas, the focus of the philosophical debate over the nature of
meaning shifted during the 1970's and 1980's from linguistic
representation to mental representation
From the Philosophy of Mind online dictionary/encyclopedia
A: How is C getting on in his new job at the bank?
B: Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.
What is the implicature?While A hasn’t been to prison, he is the
sort of person who could easily end up there.
The Cooperative Principle and the Maxims



The CP
 Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in
which you are engaged.
Specific Maxims
 Quality: make contribution 1) as informative and 2) not more informative than
required.
 Quality: don’t say 1) what you believe to be false and 2) that for which you lack
adequate evidence.
 Relation: Be relevant
 Manner: 1) avoid obscurity; 2) avoid ambiguity; 3) be brief; 4) be orderly.
 Others? Aesthetic, social, or moral, be polite, ...
Cultural Differences: What is relevant, polite, true will vary from culture
to culture.
Example where no maxims are violated



Buying gas
 A: I am out of gas.
 B: There is a station around the corner.
 B would be infringing the maxim of “be relevant” unless he thinks
that A can buy gas at the station.
Jail example: presumption that connection between implication and
prison statement is obvious.
Smith’s recent trips
 A: Smith doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend these days.
 B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately.
 In this example the speaker implicates that which he must be
assumed to believe in order to preserve the assumption that he is
observing the maxim of relation.
www.msu.edu/course/anp/420/dwyer/14%20Pragmatics.ppt
conflict between Maxims
An example in which a maxim is violated, but its violation is to be explained
by the supposition of a clash with another maxim.


A: Where does C live?
B: Somewhere in south Charlotte.
B is being vague (violating maximum of quality by saying less)
because to be more informative he would have to say
something he does not know, thus violating the maxim of quality.
Flouting Maxims
Examples that involve exploitation:




Letter of recommendation: Dear Sir, Mr X’s command of English is
excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours,
etc.
President: “I never had sex with that woman.”
Flouting allows one to say things through implicature without
actually saying it (without directly lying).
The implicature is not carried by what is said, but only by the
saying of what is said, or by ‘putting it that way.”
The Universality of the Cooperative
Principle and Maxims – or not


Grice assumes the the CP and the maxims are
universal
While universal they may not act in the same way.





Different background knowledge.
Different ways of resolving conflicts or flouting
“Do you really think I look nice in this outfit?”
Explain breakdowns in cross-cultural communication.
The utility of these maxims in ordinary conversation.
a little about Goffman

….The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959 which is
available in at least ten different languages …has been almost
continuously in print. … Erving Goffman's primary methodology
was ethnographic study, observation and participation rather than
statistical data gathering, and his theories provided an ironic
insight into routine social actions. For example, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life uses the theatrical stage as
a metaphor to explain how we "stage manage" the images we try
to convey to those around us. For this impression management,
Goffman coined the term "dramaturgy." (Diane Blackwood:
http://www.blackwood.org/Erving.htm)

You might want to reference Kenneth Burke here, and also Dell
Hymes (more about S-P-E-A-K-Ihttp://therapy.massey.ac.nz/diplomademo/175775/175_775_Dra
maturgy.htm

Erving Goffman: On Face-Work: An analysis
of Ritual Social Interaction


The concept of face:
 The presentation of the self to the other, positive or negative
Basic structural feature of social interaction.

Rule of self respect:


Rule of considerateness:


person must go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of
others present.
The Face-Threatening Act.


One is expected to maintain face
Something that does damage to one’s face.
Face Work:

Maintaining face; correcting damage
The Corrective Process
When an attempt is made to re-establish a satisfactory ritual state for
persons who have achieved social disequilibrium.

Ritual aspect: one’s face is a sacred thing. Stages -
Acknowledgement: Begins with acknowledging the threat to face.
(The interchange: seems to be a basic concrete unit of social activity.)


The challenge: participants call attention to the misconduct
The offering: whereby a participant, typically the offender, is given a chance
to correct for the offence and re-establish the expressive order.



explain as a meaningless act, a joke, unintentional, a mistake,
unavoidable, not acting himself, under the influence of something
or somebody
The acceptance (or not) by the offended of offering
Gratitude by the offender (ritual equilibrium re-established)
Think televised apologies
Politeness: Brown and Levinson




Theory, first developed in late 1970s, is based on Goffman’s
concept of face
 Face: The public self-image that every member wants to
claim for himself.
 A communication (speech act) may contain an imposition
on the “face” of the Hearer.
Language Universals extend beyond the confines of grammar.
Both are currently affiliated with Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics
Instant background
http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~comm300/mary/interpersonal/politeness/
Two types of face: Positive and Negative
Note: Negative doesn’t mean ‘bad’

Positive Face: Honor



The public self.
The positive consistent selfimage or ‘personality’ (crucially
including the desire that this
self-image be appreciated and
approved of) by interactants.
the want of every member that
her wants be desirable to at
least some others.

Negative Face: Privacy




Invented by Brown and Levinson
The concept of the right to
privacy.
The basic claim to territories,
personal preserves, rights to
non-distraction
the want of every ‘competent
adult member’ that her actions
be unimpeded by others.
Kinds of face threatened




S threatens H’s Negative Face
[imposition]
Those that put pressure on H to act:
Orders and Requests; Suggestions
and Advice; Remindings; Threats and
warnings.
Those that put H in debt (offers,
promises)
Those that expression desire or envy
of H’s possessions which lead H to
think that he has to protect them
(complements, envy, expressions of
strong emotion (hatred, anger, lust))

S threatens H’s Positive face

negative evaluation:
disapproval(criticism);
disagreement
indifference to H’s positive face:
violent emotions (reason to fear S);
irreverence; bad news about H
(good news about S); raising
divisive topics (politics); noncooperation; wrong terms of
address

Threats to H’s face v. threats to S’s


Those that offend S’s
negative Face
S expressing thanks, S
acceptance of H’s thanks;
S’s excuses; S acceptance
of offers; S’s response to
H’s faux pas; unwilling
promises and offers


Those that damage S’s
positive face
apologies; acceptance of a
complement; breakdown of
physical control, selfhumiliation, confessions,
emotional leakage
Strategies
for doing
FTAs
On Record
(directly Communicating the
FTA directly
and unequivocally (I
promise to ...)
Without redressive action, baldly
With redressive action
Positive politeness
Redress: action that gives Oriented toward the
positive face of H [honor]
face to addressee by
attempting to
counteracting the potential
face damage of the FTE
Negative politeness
Oriented toward
redressing the negative
face [privacy]
Off Record (indirect): This strategy: involves some ambiguity so that H is
not obligated to respond (Rats, I’m out of cash --cf. Grice on speech
acts).
Don’t do the FTA
Efforts to adapt ‘face’ theory
Currently many researchers use frames and strategies of
involvement and strategies of independence developed
by Scollon & Scollon to handle cross-cultural
communications. Their approach incorporates concepts
of distance, power and hierarchy, to defuse the
‘negative—bad’ association


D = Social Distance between S and H for the purposes of that act
and as determined by such things as the frequency of interaction
and the kinds of material and nonmaterial goods exchanged....
P = Power-- differential Degree to which H can impose his own
plans and own face at the expense of S’s plans and face.