IMPLICIT WARNING SPEECH ACTS IN THE MODERN GERMAN DIALOGICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

In the article on the material of contemporary German dialogical discourse implicit speech acts of warning are con­sidered in order to establish the peculiarities of their expression with the use of pragmatic linguistics methods – speech act analysis and analysis of implicatures. The object of the study are utterances that produce the speech act of warnings with implicatures in the German dialogical discourse, which are investigated for the subject of linguistic and pragmatic characteristics. The research is based on the material of German fictional texts and serials of the 20th–19th centuries, showing a character’s speech close to the spoken language. The warning speech act is considered as a hybrid illocu­tionary type, which is characterized by the simultaneous implementation of two illocutions – assertive and directive ones. These illocutions are related at the level of the propositional content: the directive component is the inducement of the sender to the addressee to an action in the interests of the latter, and the assertive component – the message of a certain state of affairs relevant for the imputed action. The warning speech act proposition is complicated: its parts are in relation of addition, moreover, they often have common arguments. The speaker has two perlocutionary goals, one of which (to make the addressee believe that the proposition is true) subordinate to another (to force him to take measures). Two illocutions – assertive (message) and directive (advice) – can be expressed both explicitly and/or implicitly. In an explicit speech act, the two parts of the warning are expressed in an explicit way – by utterances of the narrative and inductive clauses, respectively. The implicit speech act is understood as a speech act, one of whose components, or both, assertive and directive is/are expressed in an implicit way. An implicit expression means the intending of an implicature – an implicit meaning that the speaker intends, and the recipient deduces based on the literal meaning of the linguistic units and the discursive context. An implicit warning speech act has three types of expression: 1) the assertive component is expressed explicitly, the directive component is implicit, 2) the directive component is expressed explicitly, the assertive component is implicit, 3) implicitly expressed are both components. The third type has two varieties, depending on the structural type of sentence it is expressed – narrative or questionable.