Commissives

3 Key excerpts on "Commissives"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Construction of Professional Discourse

  • B.L. Gunnarsson, Per Linell, Bengt Nordberg(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The present framework suggests a classification in which directives and Commissives are subclasses of the category of regulative acts. While legislative power is clearly exercitive, the commitment in contracts can be established either as an obligation issued by one party over the other (i.e. directive), or by a party committing him/herself (i.e. commissive).

  Within a very general definition, the nature of a contract may be defined as ‘a legally binding agreement [ … ] imposing rights and obligations on the parties which will be enforced by the courts’ (Redmond 1979: 19). The language of simple contracts refers to mutual rights and obligations in relation to ‘promise’ and ‘consideration’. I shall now consider the ‘nature’ of the underlying linguistic functions for distributing such rights md obligations: directive and commissive acts.

  2.3.1 Directive acts

  A directive is an illocutionary act by means of which the addresser tries to influence the behaviour of the addressee. Directives are impositive acts which have been defined as follows:

  Impositive speech acts are described as speech acts performed by the speaker to influence the intentional behaviour of the hearer in order to get the latter to perform, primarily for the benefit of the speaker, the action directly specified or indirectly suggested by the proposition.

  (Haverkate 1984: 107)

  In outlining the terms of the contract, rules are formulated with the intent of ordering human relations. One party of the contract (e.g. principal, seller, franchiser) imposes a certain behaviour on the other party (e.g. agent, buyer, franchisee) and vice versa.

  A directive is a ‘face-threatening act’ involving a threat to the addressee's negative face, which has been defined as ‘the want of every “competent adult member” that his actions be unimpeded by others’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 62). An addresser issuing a directive attempts to exercise power or direct control over the intentional behaviour of the addressee and in this way intrudes on the right to freedom of action. In order to lessen the impact of the imposition on the addressee, the addresser has recourse to politeness strategies. The explicitness with which the act to be performed (or not performed in the case of prohibitions) is formulated is referred to as the directness level of the directive.

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  On the Pragmatics of Communication

  • Jürgen Habermas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  ii. Of course, the mode of language use would have to change as soon as the truth of the assertions presupposed with such announcements or imperatives is itself thematized. Such a change in topic would necessitate transition to an orientation toward an “agreement” that goes beyond mere “reaching understanding.” Such a switch from the use of language oriented toward reaching understanding to one oriented toward agreement may also be illustrated in a different way with the help of the examples given, for in each case there is a further possible way in which it can be negated.

  (1′″) You lack the good will necessary to take on such a strenuous commitment. (1″″) You don’t have the legal authority for that. (2′″) No, I don’t owe you anything.

  Here, however, the speech acts are presumed to have a different illocutionary meaning. For, now, the negation of (1) and (2) refers to normative validity claims that come into play only when intentional and imperative sentences are “embedded” in normative contexts and are “authorized” by a normative background. The announcement of the signing of the contract could be a commissive speech act—for instance, a promise with which the actor commits herself to something—or else a declarative speech act, with which the speaker discharges an institutional task (for example, the duty of a representative of the Board to inform the public). The imperative to hand over the money could imply a friend’s request, a superior’s command, a creditor’s demand, and so forth.

  Through backing of this kind, declarations of intention and imperatives are transformed into normatively authorized expressions of will such as promises, declarations, and commands. With this, the illocutionary meaning and validity basis of the utterances change. Normative reasons do not determine the prudential assessments of arbitrarily choosing decisionmaking subjects; they determine rather the decisions of subjects who bind their wills and are thus able to enter into obligations. In contrast to the case of “naked” declarations of intentions and “simple” imperatives, normative reasons are not actor-relative reasons for one’s own (or another’s) purposive-rational behavior but—as in the case of assertions—actor-independent reasons; however, unlike the reasons for assertions, they are not reasons for the existence of states of affairs but rather for the satisfaction of normatively binding expectations. Connected with regulative speech acts such as promises, declarations, and commands is a validity claim that has a built-in orientation toward vindication in practical discourses. In order to understand the illocutionary meaning of this sort of speech act, one has to know the normative context that explains why an actor feels authorized or obliged to perform a certain action or why, as far as the addressee is concerned, she may reckon with his compliance with the imperative. Insofar as the participants intersubjectively recognize a normative background (for example, within the framework of a shared lifeworld), they can accept regulative speech acts as valid for the same

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  Discourse in English Language Education

  • John Flowerdew(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Thus speech acts such as state, contend, insist, deny, remind, guess could be labelled as expositives (that is, expounding something), while promise, guarantee, refuse, decline could be labelled as Commissives (that is, committing the speaker to some course of action), and order, request, beg and dare could be grouped together as exercitives (that is, exercising of powers, rights or influences). The five categories which were put forward as a tentative framework by Austin (1962) are as follows: verdictives — the giving of a verdict, as by a jury or umpire — for example, estimate, reckon, appraise; exercitives — as mentioned above, the exercising of power, rights or influence — for example, appoint, vote, order, urge, advise, warn; Commissives — for example, promising or otherwise undertaking — promise, contract, undertake; behabitives — a miscellaneous group, having to do with attitudes and social behaviour — for example, apologise, congratulate, commend; expositives — the clarifying of reasons, arguments and communications — for example, reply, argue, concede, assume. The second way of classifying speech acts is Searle’s (1976) approach

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