National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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- 95 3.6. Direct and Indirect Speech Acts
| 3.4 Self-assessed Exercises (i) What is Speech Act ii) Select a written short play and discuss the use of speech acts in it. 3.5 Felicity Conditions Felicity conditions are the conditions that have to be fulfilled before an utterance can be said to be successful. They are the conditions that have to be met before one can say that a speaker has made a sincere statement. For instance, for A to request B to shut the door, the following conditions must be meta. A must believe that B has the ability to shut the door. b. A must have the desire that B should shut the door. c. A must believe that B will shut the door, if requested. d. A must have good reasons for B to shut the door. 95 3.6. Direct and Indirect Speech Acts A direct speech act is one whose proposition is clearly represented in the utterance and understood by the addressee. For instance, the statement 15.4. Please put on the fan. Is a direct speech act because it is clearly seen as a request that the addressee do something – put on the fan. Some speech acts are not this direct in their proposition, yet the addressee will still through inference and implicature understand the intention of the speaker. For example, the statement 15.5. It’s hot inhere. May bean indirect counterpart of 15.4. The addressee will by inference understand that being hot is uncomfortable. So the addressee will recognize the utterance as an indirect speech act that is making a request of him to put on the fan. Even though the utterance is a statement, its function is that of a command. It is also possible for the speaker to accomplish his intention by using the utterance 15.6. Do we have to stay in this heat all day which is a question, but still achieving the same purpose of indirectly requesting the addressee to put on the fan. The addressee would not have understood the speaker’s intention if he/she had taken 15.4 as a mere statement of factor as a Polar or Yes/No question. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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