Explores the fascinating phenomenon of indirect speech acts, highlighting the situations they are used in, and how they are understood.

A direct successor to Searle's Speech Acts (C.U.P. 1969), Expression and Meaning refines earlier analyses and extends speech-act theory to new areas including indirect and figurative discourse, metaphor and fiction.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Braunschweig, course: Approaches to Meaning, language: English, abstract: This term paper will deal with speech act theory, especially with the success of speech acts depending on certain conditions. Due to the usage of direct and indirect speech acts in everyday conversations it will be analysed which conditions have to be fulfilled to have a successful speech act. The following theories will be used to answer the research question whether the same conditions have to be fulfilled for direct and indirect speech acts to be successful: 1) Theory of Felicity Conditions by John Searle 2) Cooperative Principle by Paul Herbert Grice 3) Inference Theory by Gordon and Lakoff The hypothesis is that indirect speech acts are different than direct speech acts due to the demanded hearer uptake and the possible ambiguity. After giving definitions of important linguistic terms and theories, the success of utterances and conversations in general will be described by the help of the Cooperative Principle by Grice. Then different examples of Direct and Indirect Speech Acts will be analysed that will show the difference between the two forms. Some of the used examples are made up and some are dialogues taken from the TV-series “The Big Bang Theory” as well as “The Walking Dead”. To explain how one can interpret the implicature in an utterance, the inference theory by Gordon and Lakoff will be taken into account. In the end it is made clear that the success of Indirect Speech Acts depends on the context in which the utterance is made and also on other external conditions which the speaker cannot control himself as the speaker often requests a hearer uptake. Different texts by Austin, Thomas, Levinson, Renkema, Cruse and Yule will be studied to get an answer to the research question. Special focus will be put on the Indirect Speech Acts as they can be ambiguous and ask for a hearer uptake to be successful.

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.

Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.