Abstrakt: | The present study concerns linguistic pragmatics and the speech act theory. Speech
acts have been studied with reference to the implicitness of performatives directly linked
with the other element of the binary opposition, i.e. their explicitness. The interpretation
of implicitmess in speech acts points to the unit of pragmatic structure,
where the pragmatic meaning of an unettered performative shifts to the grammar,
semantics and intonation of the utterance which is adequate in a given situation
and is regulated by the context and the interlocutors’ action. It has been confirmed
that such implicitness is characteristic of ‘normal dialogues’, where interlocutors tend
to minimize verbal communication and often leave out obvious elements of information.
The author’s aim has been to investigate both performative and nonperformative
signalling of illocutionary meaning referring to two types of speech acts, defined
by Searle as assertives and directives. She has tred to find out what (semantic,
grammatical contextual, situational, pragamtic) conditions limit the use of explicit
performatives and hich of them (being implicit) determine the right interpretation
of the speaker’s intentions. The language material is dialogues taken from artistic
texts that imitate colloquial speech.
The interpretation of the key notions of pragmatics allows one to define constatées
as accounts of the world and illocutionary utterances, in which the speaker’s
intentions are signalled. The notion of assertive should be clearly distinguished from
that of assertion, which is a logical rather than a linguistic term. The author analyzes
concrete linguistic devices that make constatives distinct from subjective ways
of speaking in assertive speech acts. The subject of the observation has been conversations,
debates, arguments and quarrels, which are often pragmatically ambiguous.
The illocutionary force of directive speech acts has been analysed on the basis
of requests, permissions, commands, demands, prohibitions, suggestions, advice
and recommendation. The conclusions show that all kinds of pragmatic meaning
are found in the utterances with both explicit and implicit performatives. Even
apparently unambiguous performatives are pragmatically complex and resist unequi vocal interpretation. In the case of implicit performatives the pragmatic sense of
the unnamed verb is conveyed or even intensified by the directive context, situation,
semantic meaning of the proposition, grammatical forms, including imperatives
and certain non-imperatives, interrogative requests, contextual shortcuts and intonation.
The study provides rich language mateial that can be used in teaching Russian as
a foreign language. |