The Study on Speech Acts from the Perspective of Situated Discourse
Lihe Huang · Journal of Zhejiang Education Institute · 2014
As a central topic in pragmatics,Speech Act receives much attention from linguists,among which many studies focus on illocutionary verbs,or adopt a formalized theory of illocutionary acts from modern logic. These characteristics may be attributed to various reasons including logic philosophy tradition,the view on illocutionary act in discourse and the limitation of research methods.With the development of pragmatics,the studies on speech acts have been gradually adopting more theoretical perspectives and research methodologies,among which some attention on speech acts in interaction has been paid to. Some researchers advocate a methodological cooperation between Speech Acts study and Conversation Analysis. Both the approaches work on Situated Discourse. As the natural discourse environment for speakers’ illocutionary acts,situated discourse has the property of multimodality. Consequently,live illocutionary forces in situated discourse are also multimodal and much information from speakers serves as the Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices( IFIDs). Therefore,it is quite necessary to investigate how multimodal information,including but not limited to prosodic features and non-verbal acts,has been impacted by speakers’ occurrent emotions,and how the triadic interaction of emotion,prosody and non-verbal acts produces a variety of live illocutionary forces.This paper therefore analyses the property of illocutionary act and illocutionary force in situated discourse,and then elaborates the idea based on Simulative Modeling to develop a study on illocutionary force in situated discourse,which is believed as a new approach to broaden the scope of Speech Act study.