Henk Haverkate

A speech act analysis of irony

Abstract The aim of this paper is to show that the category of verbal irony can be properly described within the framework of the theory of speech acts. It is argued that speakers make use of irony in order to produce certain perlocutionary effects on their hearers, the principal ones being to break their patterns of expectation, and involve them in a type of verbal interaction that is characterized by interpersonal distance. The paper starts with a critical evaluation of traditional definitions, which, for the greater part, qualify irony as a rhetoric or stylistic figure of speech. Conceptually, these definitions are centered around two criteria: (1) saying the opposite of what you mean, and (2) saying something different from what you mean. It is the thesis of this paper that both these criteria can be integrated into a homogeneous pragmalinguistic frame of reference. That is to say, taking into account the componential structure of the speech act, the above criteria are found to play an essential part in the analysis of the propositional and the illocutionary component of the speech act, respectively.

Speech Acts, Speakers and Hearers: Reference and referential strategies in Spanish

This study is an inquiry into the pragmatics of speaker and hearer reference. It falls into a theory-based and a description-based part. The former covers three topics: (a) the categories of speaker and hearer as opposed to the category of nonparticipants in the speech act; (b) the interactional roles of speaker and hearer as defined by the illocutionary point of the speech act and the preconditions underlying its successful performance; (c) the decomposition of the speech act as a model for describing strategies in verbal interaction. The object of the descriptive part of this study is to survey the different realizations of the categories of speaker and hearer reference and the strategic effects speakers intend to bring about by employing them. For this purpose, a language-specific analysis is applied to the system of speaker and hearer reference in Peninsular Spanish. For the sake of homogeneity, Peninsular Spanish is also chosen as the object language for the discussion of the general language phenomena which are treated in the theoretical discussion.

Strategies in linguistic action

Abstract This paper takes as its thesis the fact that strategies in linguistic action can be properly described in terms of a componential analysis of the speech act. The subacts to be distinguished are the phonetic, the illocutionary, the referring and the predicating act. The first section serves as a general introduction to the subject, dealing in particular with the concepts of weak and strong successfulness, and the intention and the purpose of actions. In the following sections some concrete examples are presented in order to demonstrate which kinds of strategies speakers develop in performing each of the four subacts distinguished. At the referring level, for instance, the category of vocatives and the distinction between polite and familiar forms of address is discussed; at the illocutionary level particular attention is paid to the strategies inherent in the performance of impositive speech acts. In relation to this certain formal and strategical properties of indirect speech acts will be analyzed. In the concluding section the hypothesis is put forward that languages might differ as to the proportion in which their speakers prefer to make use of phonetic, illocutionary, referring or predicating strategies.

Pragmatic and linguistic aspects of the prepositional infinitive in Spanish

Abstract The present paper deals with prepositional infinitive constructions with imperative force, such as A callar! (‘Shut up!’), A trabajar! (‘Go to work!’) and Pues a hacerlo tu, entonces (‘So you do it!’). It is argued that prepositional infinitives belong to the class of impositive speech acts, which are a subclass of directive speech acts. By means of a systematic comparison between the imperative and the prepositional infinitive it is demonstrated that the latter has a more emphatic force than the former. The semantic analysis of the construction shows that the speaker using it wants the corresponding command to be carried out immediately. As for the syntactic structure of the prepositional infinitive, its transformational relationship with the ir a + infinitive periphrasis is discussed, as well as the possibilities of deriving both from a single performative deep structure. Lastly, the surface realizations of the subject are examined.