Interpretation of Indirect Speech Acts in Canonical Constructions

Abstract

This paper describes actual distributions of indirect speech acts in three frequent canonical constructions (States/SVC, Location/SV, and Possession/SVO) through the spoken corpus and discusses their pedagogical significances to function-based pedagogical grammar introducing typical speech acts. In the current study, one thousand exemplars for each construction were randomly selected from the Spoken BNC2014 corpus. Then, indirect speech acts in exemplars were interpreted and coded according to van Ek & Trim’s (1998) six language functions: (1) imparting and seeking factual information, (2) expressing and finding out attitudes, (3) getting things done, (4) socializing, (5) structuring discourse, and (6) communication repair. As a result, it was found that indirect speech acts related to language functions (1) and (2) were most often seen in three frequent canonical constructions; furthermore, the relationships between three canonical constructions and twenty-six indirect speech acts emerged through the correspondence analysis. Finally, based on the results, indirect speech acts instructions were explored.