APELC Class Notes
Objective: APELCers reviewed Speech Act theory.
Juniors and seniors, it was nice, but exhausting, to be back. Thinking is hard, but I tried to summarize Speech Act Theory for you in a way that I believe will be useful to our continued practice of argument and analysis. I asked you to focus on three main ideas from your reading:
Once we begin to look at utterances from the point of view of what they do, it is possible to see every utterance as a speech act of one kind or other, as having some functional value which might be quite independent of the actual words used and their grammatical arrangement (Wardhaugh, 302).
Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other [. . . .] Language appears to us in this function not as an instrument of reflection but as a mode of action (Malinowski qtd. in Wardhaugh 303).
Conversation [. . .] involves a considerable amount of role-playing: We choose a role for ourselves in each conversation, discover the role or roles the other or others are playing, and then proceed to construct a little dramatic encounter, much of which involves respecting each others’ faces (309).
And finally, I described how you might apply an understanding of speech acts to the various types of text we encounter (verbal, written, visual, et cetera). I encouraged you to use cultural and linguistic clues to:
- Discover the “affective state of the speaker [of a text] and a profile of his identity”.
- Infer what implications lie behind the speaker’s words and what he or she wants audiences to do.
- Determine the necessary conditions that make interaction feasible, possible, and meaningful and what, if any, conversational maxims are followed or broken and to what end.
Much of what we covered will become part of our regular discussions, so while I don’t expect you to memorize the vocabulary of the reading, you should expect to hear and be able to understand it when I or your peers use it.
Remember to attend your readings and I’ll see you next class.