tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A SITUATION SEMANTICS APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS"

During thc past two decades, much work in linguistics has focused on sentences as minimal units of communication, and the project of rigorously characterizing the structure of sentences in natural language has met with some succcss. Not surprisingly, however, sentcnce grammars have contributed little to the analysis of discourse, Human discourse consists not just of words in sequences, hut of words in sequences directed by a speaker to an addressee, used to represent situations and to reveal intentions. Only when the addressee has apprehcndcd both these aspects of the message communicated can the message be interpretecL . | A SITUATION SEMANTICS APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS1 David Andreoff Evans Stanford University 1. INTRODUCTION During the past two decades much work in linguistics has focused on sentences as minimal units of communication and the project of rigorously characterizing the structure of sentences in natural language has met with some success. Not surprisingly however sentence grammars have contributed little to the analysis of discourse. Human discourse consists not just of words in sequences but of words in sequences directed by a speaker to an addressee used to represent situations and to reveal intentions. Only when the addressee has apprehended both these aspects of the message communicated can the message be interpreted. The analysis of discourse that emerges from Austin 1962 grounded in a theory of action takes this view as central and the concept of the speech act follows naturally. An utterance may have a conventional meaning but the interpretation of the actual meaning of the utterance as it is used in discourse depends on evaluating the utterance in the context of the set of intentions which represent the illocutionary mode of its presentation. Put anodrer way paraphrasing Searle 1975 3 . the speaker s intention is to produce understanding consisting of the knowledge of conditions on the speech act being performed. If we arc to take seriously Searle s 1969 16 assertion that the unit of linguistic communication is not . the symbol word or sentence . but rather the production or the issuance of the symbol word or sentence in the performance of the speech act. then we should be able to find some formal method of characterizing speech acts in discourse. Unfortunately linguists have too often employed speech acts as taxonomic conveniences as in Dore 1977 Labov and Fanshcl 1977 and elsewhere without attempting to give anything more than a descriptive definition. Only in the artificial intelligence literature notably in the work of Allen Bruce Cohen and .

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