Direct vs. indirect speech acts
As we noted, the three most common things that speakers do by speaking are: (i) making STATEMENTS (asserting or denying the truth of a proposition); (ii) asking QUESTIONS (questioning the truth of a proposition, or asking for additional information about a proposition); and (iii) giving COMMANDS. Most languages have specific grammatical patterns that are used to indicate which of these actions the speaker in tends to perform: DECLARATIVE for statements; INTERROGATIVE for questions; and IMPERATIVE for commands. These three sentence types correspond to the MAJOR MOOD categories. The primary function of each major mood category is shown in (1).
The table in (1) shows the typical or expected sentence type (i.e. grammatical form) that would be used for expressing a given pragmatic function. DIRECT SPEECH ACTS are those in which this expected correlation is preserved: the form of the sentence matches the purpose, or intended force, of the utterance. Some examples are given in (2).
However, speakers do not always choose the expected sentence type to express their intended function. Sometimes a speaker uses some other form to create a desired effect. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS are those in which there is a mismatch between the sentence type and the intended force. Some examples are given in (3). ARHETORICAL QUESTION is a very common type of indirect speech act which involves the use of the interrogative form for some purpose other than asking questions, as in (3a) and (3c).
In Commands (imperative sentences) and Questions (interrogative sentences), we will focus on the grammatical features of imperative and interrogative sentence patterns; in Negation we will discuss patterns of sentence negation. But first, in Basic word order, we make some general observations about variation in word order, since word order is often significant in distinguishing one type of sentence from another.
