Pragmatic Formulaic Sequences in Canonical Constructions and Indirect Speech Acts

Abstract

This paper describes indirect speech acts in five canonical constructions (i.e., Emotion/SVO, Perception & Cognition/SVO, Mental/SVO, Self-motion/SV, and Communication/SVO) through the spoken BNC2014 corpus with special reference to their pragmatic formulaic sequences (e.g., Aijmer, 1996; Adolphs, 2008; Bardovi-Harlig, 2019). Moreover, it also examines what canonical constructions can be illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) and proposes pragmalinguistic sequences in the constructions as minimum essentials in function-based approach to communicative ESL grammar instructions. A corpus-based study found that five canonical constructions were often used in reporting something to someone; for example, tastes, memories (experiences), ideas, and others’ verbal behavior although each construction was mainly used in realizing its own indirect speech acts in relation to each canonical schema. Finally, this paper proposes pedagogical implications for function-based English grammar and its instructions for L2 learners’ form-function-context mappings.