A Pragmatic Account Of Presequence In Conversation

The present study aims to analyze the function of Presequence in conversation from a pragmatic perspective. The notion of felicity conditions of speech acts and the notion of global speech act are firstly introduced. Traditional speech act theory claims that speech acts are governed by a set of constitutive rules, which are called felicity conditions of speech acts. For each speech act to be successfully and non-defectively performed, felicity conditions must be satisfied. Traditional speech act theory also claims that there is a one-to-one mapping relationship between acts and utterances. There are, however, cases where a speech act is performed with multi-turn utterances, not with a single utterance. The speech act performed in this way is called global speech act.The present study views the speech act performed with Presequence as a global speech act and assumes that Presequence functions both transactionally and interactionally in the accomplishment of the global speech act. On the one hand, Felicity Conditions, as internal factors, determine the employment of Presequence. Presequence, together with the head-act sequence, works collectively in realizing the four Felicity Conditions of the global speech act. The latter realizes the Essential Condition and Presequence realizes the Preparatory Condition, the Propositional Content Condition and the Sincerity Condition. On the other hand, politeness, as external factors, also governs the employment of Presequence. When people perform speech acts, the speaker's face or both parties' face will be probably threatened. The speaker usually employs Presequence to mitigate or redress the potential face threat. The present study shows that Presequence can redress the initiator's positive face, the responder's positive face and the responder's negative face.