Mateusz Sylwestrzak 2MA

Nov 18, 2015

Below you will find an utterance. Explain why this utterances can be classified as an nonconventional indirect
speech act. Why the utterance can, for example, count as an act of thanking? While providing an explanation
you might consider using the terms such as convention, inferential load, multiplicity of meaning, purposefulness
(the effect on the addressee), illocutionary force, perlocutionary force, felicitous speech act, the performative
formula. (Use 350-500 words)
1.Oh, I love coffee

An indirect speech act is one where there is no clear relationship between a sentence type and
an illocutionary force (Huang 2006: 661). Apart from conveying the literal meaning, an
indirect speech act also provides an indirect meaning dependent on the context of its use.
This is just terrific! might thus be a statement approving or disproving of something
depending whether it was uttered in an outright or an ironic way.
An indirect act might be either conventional or non-conventional. A non-conventional
speech act differs from a conventional speech act in that it has a multiple functions and
requires more cognitive resources to process a given utterance (Adolphs 2008: 27).
Furthermore, a non-conventional indirect speech act does not follow the particular lexicogrammatical structure to perform a given function. Following this train of though, Can I use
your bathroom? is a conventional indirect speech act of requesting bathroom access while I
need to pee. is its non-conventional counterpart.
By a similar token, the utterance Oh, I love coffee might be a non-conventional act
of thanking. It is indirect in that it does not use the IFID verb to thank in a overt and explicit
way. This is synonymous to saying that an implicature needs to be drawn before the act can be
interpreted as an instance of thanking. The utterance is also non-conventional in that it does
not follow any of the typical lexico-grammatical patterns typical of thanking, e.g. It was very
kind of you, You did not have to, That's great of you etc.
As is the case with other non-conventional indirect speech acts, Oh, I love coffee
needs to meet a number of strictly defined felicity conditions in order to be a valid act of
thanking. First, a person has to get a coffee from another person. Second, the act of giving
needs to be voluntary and purposeful in the eyes of the person thanking for the coffee;
expressing gratefulness for a deed of which the donor is not aware seems out of place.
Provided that all the aforementioned felicity conditions have been met, the utterance Oh, I
love coffee might thus be considered as an act of thanking.
References:
Huang 2006 the reading assignment from moodle
Svenja, Adolphs. 2008. Corpus and Context: Investigating Pragmatic Functions in Spoken Discourse.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.