Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

e. Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices IFIDs

Besides considering the felicity conditions, the hearer can recognize the intended illocutionary force by considering Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices IFIDs.According to Schiffrin 1994: 56 illocutionary force indicating devices can be regarded as certain linguistic elements that provide conventional procedures by which to perform a given act. The most obvious device for indicating the illocutionary force is through the use of performative verb Vp which explicitly mentions the act being performed Yule, 1996: 49. Most of the time, however, people do not explicitly perform what they say in the sense that they do not mention the performative verb. When such cases happen, the intended illocutionary force can be identified through the word order, stress, intonation contour, punctuation and the mood of the verb.

4. Context

Context plays a significant role in pragmatics because it determines the interpretation of the utterances delivered by the speakers. The interpretation of the utterances will be different if the context had been slightly different. Sadock1978: 281 as cited in Brown and Yule 1983: 35 expresses the importance of context as follows: There is, then, a serious methodological problem that confronts the advocate of linguistic pragmatics. Given some aspects of what a sentence conveys in a particular context, is that aspect part of what the sentence conveys in virtue of its meaning . . . or should it be worked out on the basis of Gricean principles from the rest of the meaning of the sentence and relevant facts of the context of utterance? Furthermore, Yule 1996: 21 views context as the physical environment in which a referring expression is used. Similarly, Cutting 2002: 2 states that context refers to the knowledge of physical and social world, and the socio- psychological factors influencing communication as well as the knowledge of the time and place in which the words are uttered or written. Meanwhile, Mey 1993: 39 argues that context is more than just a matter of reference and of understanding what things are about; it gives a deeper meaning to utterances. For an instance: It’s a long time since we visited your mother. The utterance has an entirely different meaning when it is uttered at the coffee table in a married couple’s living room than the same utterance uttered by a husband to his wife when they are attending the local zoo. Thus, it is clear that context is very essential in assigning a proper value to such phenomena such as presuppositions, implicature as well as dealing with other issues in pragmatics. Context can be divided into two kinds, i.e. context of situation and cultural context.

a. Context of Situation

According to Cutting 2002: 3, context of situation refers the context surrounds the speakers to which they can see it. It is the immediate physical co presence, the situation where the interaction is taking place at the moment of speaking. In addition, Hymes1974 as cited in Wardhaugh2006: 247 emphasizes the importance of an ethnographic view of communicative events within communities. He explicates that context of situation will limit the range of possible of interpretation, and on the other hand, support the intended interpretation. He, then, developed the SPEAKING model that is relevant to the identification of speech event and speech acts. 1 S Setting and Scene Setting refers to the time and place, i.e. the concrete physical circumstances in which speech takes place. In other words, it is where the event is situated. For example, a classroom can be a setting where the teaching and learning process occurs. Meanwhile, scene refers to the abstract psychological setting, or the cultural definition of the occasion. Participants are allowed to change scenes within a particular setting. They can change the level of formality or the kind of activity in which they are involved. 2 P Participants Participants are the ones involved in the conversation. They include speaker-listener, addressor-addressee, or sender-receiver. They generally fill certain socially specified field roles. For example, in a classroom context, the participant involves a teacher and his or her students. 3 E Ends Ends refer to the conventionally recognized and expected outcomes or goals of an exchange as well as to the personal goals that participants seek to accomplish on particular occasions. To put it simply, ends are what the participants intend to achieve by saying such speech acts. For instance, the teacher may pose a question to the students to get some information, to activate their background knowledge or to check their comprehension.