An Analysis Of Pragmatic Function Of Indirect Speech Act From The Perspective Of Conversational Implicature Theory

The definition of Speech Act was first put forward by Austin who is a Britishphilosopher. Instead of indicating, it more emphasizes on getting things done whenpeople are making use of language, which embodies the linguistic view of words andacts. In1975, Searle raised the Indirect Speech Act Theory based on Austin’s earlystudy which illustrates that one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way ofperforming another. Namely, an Indirect Speech Act involves the performance of twodistinct speech acts because people usually express something with some certainpurposes in their daily dialogue. As a result, people do not speak in direct way ineveryday actual conversations owing to politeness, concealment, taboo and so forth.Thus, people prefer to use indirect speech to express their real intentions. Searle’sachievement, to a great extent, is that he combines Speech Act theory withCoversational Implicature put forward by Grice and believes that there is a closerelationship between Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and CoversationalImplicature. Since Austin’s Speech Act, Searle puts forward ConversationalImplicature theory from the perspective of conversational principles. He maintainsthat violation of Cooperative Principle is sign of implicature existing which helpspeople to identify the meanings of speech. Conversational Implicature theory explainswhy the literal meaning of the words or sentences are different from their actualtruth-value meaning, which is similar to Searle’s Indirect Speech Act theory. In recentyears, Speech Act theory attracts many modern linguists’ great attention. Manyscholars in the linguistics field engage in these two theories form aspect of linguistics,cognition, philosophy and psychology. Professor Jinli who is from Center ofLinguistic and Perceive in Zhejiang University redefines the Cooperative Principle. Inhis book Cooperation and Conversation he discusses the Cooperative Principle fromSpeech Act theory angles and further proposed the concepts of locutionarycooperation, illocutionary cooperation and perlocutionary cooperation. Later, he specifically described how to explain human being language communication in a wayof combination of Cooperative Principle and Speech Act theory in his book.When the author collects the corpus the author realized that Indirect Speech Actnot only attracts large amount of scholars’ attention but also are widely applied inpeople’s daily conversations. From this point of view this paper proceeds to humanbeing daily actual dialogue and therefore selects the American sitcom Friends toexplore the implication of Indirect Speech Act, because the sitcom Friends are full ofpeople daily conversation. This paper bases on Cooperative Principle, PolitenessPrinciple and Face Theory and adopts the qualitative analysis and quantitativeanalysis as research methods to analyze pragmatic function of Indirect Speech Actform politeness, concealment, irony and strong passion expression Thereby, this paperaims to help the listeners to further understand speakers’ implied intention. On thebasis of corpus and literature review, this paper explores how the Indirect Speech Actproduce the implication in view of the Conversational Implicature theory andviolation of the Cooperative Principle, complying with Politeness Principle and FaceTheory which can deduce the process of Conversational Implicature from generalityto its specificity, and then come to the pragmatic function.. The significance of thisresearch is to combine two major pragmatic theories---Speech Act andConversational Implicature to explore implications so as to help people avoidmisunderstanding in our daily utterances. This paper tries to solve two questions:How does the Conversational Implicature come into being during the Indirect SpeechAct? and What pragmatic functions generate in the Indirect Speech Act?There are five parts in this paper.Chapter one is introduction. This part mainly summarizes the background,purpose, significance and structure of this essay. From the perspective ofConversational Implicature theory this paper analyzes the Indirect Speech Act in orderto infer the pragmatic functions of Indirect Speech Act. It can improve theunderstanding of people’s implicature and make the communication more efficient.Chapter two focuses on literature review. This part focuses on the relevanttheories of Speech Act proposed by some famous linguists including Austin’s SpeechAct theory, Searles’ Indirect Speech Act theory and Grice’s ConversationalImplicature theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Face Theory.Chapter three aims to introduce theoretical framework and research methodologyof this essay which include research questions, data collection and case study. The qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis as main research methods are used byauthor. This paper probed into the two questions: How does the ConversationalImplicature come into being during the Indirect Speech Act? and What pragmaticfunctions generate in the Indirect Speech Act in Friends?Cchapter four is to analyze the pragmatic functions of Indirect Speech Act insamples of Friend’s lines from Conversational Implicature angle. This partconcentrates on studying the pragmatic functions from politeness, concealment, ironyand strong passion expression.Chapter five is conclusion. The author does a summary on the results and thelimitation of this research in this part.The author finally hopes that readers can make good use of the Indirect SpeechAct theory after reading this paper and also expects that this paper can makecontribution to the related future pragmatics research.