SPEECH ACTS AND
CLAUSE TYPES
SUMMARY
1 Speech acts are the acts we perform through words. Certain general types of speech act are basic to everyday interaction; these are statements, questions, exclamations and directives, the latter covering orders, requests and instructions among others.
2 Each of these basic speech acts is associated in the grammar with a type of clause: the declarative is typically used to encode a statement, the interrogative a question, the imperative a directive and the exclamative an exclamation. These are the direct correspondences between form and function that we refer to as direct speech acts.
3 Indirect correspondences are also common in English. Thus declaratives, as well as encoding statements, can be used to ask questions, utter exclamations and issue directives, in addition to other speech acts such as promising and warning. In such cases the form is used to convey an ‘intended meaning’ or ‘illocutionary force’ that is different from its basic one. You’re staying here, then? has the form of a declarative – but, with appropriate intonation, the force is that of a question, as is indicated by the punctuation. The relationship between clause type and force is therefore not one-to-one but many-to-many.
4 Even more indirectly, the words we use do not always fully express our intended speech act. For example, It’s cold in here might be intended, and interpreted, as a request to turn up the heating. Hearers use inference to recover the intended meaning at specific points in a conversation, based on assumptions of cooperativeness, truth, relevance and cultural knowledge.
