Toward Multimodal Pragmatics

A Study of Illocutionary Force in Chinese Situated Discourse

Lihe Huang

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000515794
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Linguistics

Classic pragmatic theories emphasize the linguistic aspect of illocutionary acts and forces. However, as multimodality has gained importance and popularity, multimodal pragmatics has quickly become a frontier of pragmatic studies. This book adds to this new research trend by offering a perspective of situated discourse in the Chinese context.

Using the multimodal corpus approach, this study examines how speakers use multiple devices to perform illocutionary acts and express illocutionary forces. Not only does the author use qualitative analysis to study the types, characteristics, and emergence patterns of illocutionary forces, he also performs a quantitative, corpus-based analysis of the interaction of illocutionary forces, emotions, prosody, and gestures. The results show that illocutionary forces are multimodal in nature while meaning in discourse is created through an interplay of an array of modalities.

Students and scholars of pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and Chinese linguistics will benefit from this title.

1 Some preliminary remarks

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251774-1

1.1 Research review of speech act theory and illocutionary force

The study of speech acts is a critical area of pragmatics. It is vital to carry out an intensive investigation into how speakers use various expressive devices to perform speech acts and shape illocutionary forces in situated discourse.¹ As these researches present broad multidisciplinary application prospects in HCI, AI, etc., it has become one of the key research fields in today’s linguistics community.

From a diachronic perspective, the study of speech acts can be divided into three stages: (1) establishing speech act theory and early research by analytical philosophers, (2) including linguists from a purely linguistic perspective, and (3) now expanding with the corpus-based approach.

1.1.1 The establishment of speech act theory and early studies by analytical philosophers

With the development of mathematical logic and linguistics, focusing on language has become a prominent feature of Western philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. Philosophers engaged in these studies are called linguistic philosophers, and their research belongs to the philosophy of analysis. Against the background of the ‘linguistic turn’ in Western philosophy, Austin proposed the Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962) in the 1950s, which originated from his exploration of three philosophical issues, including the relationship between daily language and philosophical research, the methodology of behaviour research, and the distinction of constatives and performatives. Afterward, Austin rediscovered that there was no substantial difference between constatives and performatives, since as far as the speakers are sincere when they make the utterance, they are ‘doing things with words’ and producing the corresponding illocutionary force.² After this, Austin made a new leap in his exploration of speech act theory. Accordingly, the study of speech acts gradually became one of the core fields in pragmatics.

Adopting the abstract method, Austin extracted three types of acts from a complete speech act: Locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. In speech act theory, a locutionary act is the act of making a meaningful utterance; an illocutionary act is the act that attaches certain illocutionary force to the meaningful utterance in a specific context; and a perlocutionary act is a speech act that produces an intended effect achieved in an addressee by a speaker’s utterance (Gu, 1989: 30–31). However, it is worth noting that Austin’s abstract method was not to divide speech acts into three separate parts, but to examine the same thing from different dimensions or perspectives; also, the relationship between abstracted acts is not compositional but inclusive (Gu, 1989: 32). Among these three abstracted speech acts, Austin shed most light on the illocutionary act; later, his speech act theory also entirely focused around the illocutionary act. After Austin, the illocutionary act/force became the top priority in the research of speech acts, which received extensive attention and in-depth discussion by scholars.

Austin claimed that speech act verbs/phrases are important cues for decoding speech acts. In this sense, he divided verbs in natural language into speech act verbs and perlocutionary act verbs, which can be regarded as one of the bases for distinguishing the two types of speech acts. There are thousands of speech act verbs; what does it mean for people accomplishing thousands of things ‘using words?’ In this case, it is necessary to bring up the taxonomy of illocutionary acts.³ Since Austin utilized speech act verbs to distinguish illocutionary act/force, he believed that consulting dictionaries was the first useful step; five categories of speech act are listed: Verdictives, exercitives, commissives, expositives, and behabitives. However, Austin’s classification has some problems. Firstly, the classification blurs the differences between illocutionary force and speech act verbs, and equates the two (see Gu, 2002a: F28). This action consequently misclassified the study of illocutionary force, which should be recognized as a behavioural study, as syntactic and semantic research on speech act verbs. Evidence shows that many scholars since Austin regarded speech act verbs as the core of the study of speech acts. Undeniably, such a tendency was influenced by Austin’s approach, equating the classification of illocutionary force with that of speech act verbs. Secondly, unified standards are absent in Austin’s categorization. For instance, the determining criteria of expositives are based on the speaker’s attitude while exercitives are based on the speaker’s status, power, and identity. Also, the contents of each category are somewhat confusing and sometimes overlapping. Nevertheless, though Austin’s classification of illocutionary force seemed not to be that successful, it stimulated a heated discussion on how to classify speech acts, where scholars gradually deepened their understanding of speech act theory while recognizing Austin’s classification deficiencies.

However, Austin was not the only scholar who regarded language as an act because phenomenological philosophers, including F. Brentano, E. Husserl, A. Reinach, and J. Daubert, long discussed the phenomena in words (Gu, 1994a: 2), and his understanding of the essence and taxonomy of speech act is also far from satisfactory. Despite that, scholars generally acknowledged that Austin’s insights on speech acts and illocutionary force were valuable contributions to speech act theory (Gu, 1989: 36). Furthermore, it is of great illuminative significance to view language use as an act.

A series of subsequent studies by Searle et al. (Searle, 1969, 1976, 1979; Searle, Kiefer, & Bierwisch, 1980; Searle & Vanderveken, 1985, etc.) developed and enriched Austin’s speech act theory. Gu (1994a: 2) proposed that Searle’s work on speech acts could be summarized in three aspects: critiques of Austin’s speech act theory, unique contribution to speech act theory, and logical analysis of the speech act presented in collaboration with Vanderveken.

In terms of Austin’s speech act theory critiques, Searle mainly focused on the abstract segmentation and classification of speech acts. He argued that semantics and speech act are not two independent studies, but the same study from two different perspectives. The new recognition that the meaning of a sentence determines speech act in an appropriate context and basically defines illocutionary force makes the separation of the illocutionary act and locutionary act untenable. Searle therefore proposed ‘the propositional act’, i.e. different discourses can express the same proposition, but they have diverse illocutionary force (Gu, 1994a: 3). Searle (1976) pointed out that Austin’s deficiencies in illocutionary acts are reflected in at least six aspects: (1) Explicit criteria for classification are absent; (2) it is a mistake to categorize illocutionary acts as speech act verbs; (3) speech acts overlap in different categories; (4) miscellaneous speech act verbs arise in a specific category of illocutionary act; (5) some speech acts do not match the definition of the category; and (6) there is a failure to recognize that not all verbs are speech act verbs. Therein, the lack of an explicit classification standard is the biggest drawback that gave birth to all the other defects.

As the first scholar to put forward a set of speech act theories and the concept of an ‘indirect speech act,’ Searle made a unique contribution to speech act theory. Following Searle (1969: 21), language communication belonged to the science of human behaviour, because its most basic unit is the speech act generated and restricted by a series of constitutive rules. Meanwhile, Searle determined the sufficient and necessary conditions together with the constitutive rules of speech acts and further explored 12 dimensions to classify speech acts. In terms of these dimensions, four of them are the most important: (1) The illocutionary point⁴ of a speech act, (2) the direction of fit between discourse and the objective world, (3) the psychological states of discourse expression, and (4) the content of the proposition. On that basis, he divided speech acts into five categories: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. Then he employed formalized methods to describe the above five speech acts, respectively.

Moreover, Searle and Vanderveken (1985: ix) also sought to give a logical analysis of the speech act. In the preface of Foundations of illocutionary logic, they claimed that ‘there have been few attempts to present formalized accounts of the logic of speech acts’. On this account, the book was written to establish a precise formalized theory of illocutionary acts under the guidance of modern logic resources. Vanderveken (1994: 100) pointed out that illocutionary logic can be integrated into general formal semantics (see Fu, 2005). Related studies mainly focused on the dimensions of speech act verbs, semantics, etc., restricting the study of speech acts and illocutionary force to the categories of logical philosophy and formal semantics to research by following the path of formal logic.

Grice’s (1975, 1978) series of papers illustrated the cooperative principle and four subordinate maxims (maxim of quantity, quality, relation, and manner), which are under the postulate that the speaker and hearer are both rational beings.⁵ These crucial axioms, initially proposed by Grice for conversational exchanges, were later applied to construe the speaker’s sincere intention behind the illocutionary force in a specific situation. Likewise, Strawson (1964) also delved into the intentions entailed in speech acts, which is closely related to Grice’s theory of meaning/intention. With the principle of politeness, Leech (1983) examined the motivation to use indirect speech acts and concluded that people use indirect speech acts out of politeness. Additionally, it should be noted that the ‘utterance’ proposed by Grice is a broad concept that includes both verbal and non-verbal acts. In other words, an utterance could be a string of words or a body movement. In previous research, pragmatics was tied in with the verbal communication of language; therefore, it excluded Grice’s argument that body movements are utterances and Austin’s theory of the perlocutionary act from pragmatic research. In fact, language use and social activities are intertwined, and hence a general theory of behaviour is needed as a more fundamental theoretical framework to deal with the complicated situations of language use (Gu, 2010: xv–xvi).

Bach and Harnish (1979) also made significant contributions to the development of speech act theory. They proposed that the speaker’s intention and hearer’s recognition are both crucial in language communication, that is, to understand the implications of the speaker’s words, the hearer also has to make full use of the communicative intention and the hearer’s inference in addition to the content and context of the discourse, so as to connect language structure and speech behaviour (Bach & Harnish, 1979: xi). Such an ‘intention-and-inference’ approach is widely divergent from Austin’s argument – acting is totally conventional. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that some illocutionary acts are conventional and do not need ‘intention- reasoning’ (Bach & Harnish, 1979: xvi).

Bach and Harnish (1979: xii) claimed that their methods almost rely upon analytical philosophy and linguistics and combine methods related to cognitive psychology and social psychology. Their explorations on pragmatics were already in accord with those of linguists, i.e. regarding language use as an activity in which people use language to exchange information. Building on that exploration, the illocutionary act is an act of linguistic communication, or rather, an act of expressing attitude through utterance. A successful illocutionary act (speech act) is achieved when the hearer understands the speaker’s attitude through reflexive intention (Bach & Harnish, 1979: xv), and certainly, the speaker also ‘intentionally’ supposes that the hearer understands his/her intentions. Indeed, such a reflexive intention also serves as the distinguishing feature of different illocutionary acts. Bach and Harnish (1979) treated speech acts purely from the perspective of ‘information communication,’ which completely isolated illocutionary acts from perlocutionary acts, for the reason that as the latter is beyond the scope of linguistic communication, it should be excluded from the pragmatic field. Based on ‘information and communication theory,’ this pragmatic perspective influenced many linguists, including Leech and Levinson (Gu, 1993, 1994).

Additionally, the taxonomy of speech acts developed by Bach and Harnish (1979: 39–59) was quite distinctive. According to the attitudes of speaker and those of hearer, they categorized various speech acts into four groups, including: (1) constatives (that express a s...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword: multimodality and pragmatics
• Preface: developing multimodal pragmatics from speech act study
• 1 Some preliminary remarks
• 2 Situated discourse and multimodal corpus
• 3 Illocutionary force study: basic methodology and theory
• 4 Discovery Procedure of live illocutionary force
• 5 Collecting and processing multimodal data
• 6 Developing a multimodal corpus of speech acts in situated discourse
• 7 Types and tokens of illocutionary force in situated discourse
• 8 Dynamic interaction of illocutionary forces in situated discourse
• 9 A multimodal study of illocutionary force: what has been found?
• 10 Developing multimodal pragmatics
• References
• Index