THE PROBLEM OF SPEECH ACTS DEFINING AND INTERPRETING IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DISCOURSE: COGNITIVE PRAGMATIC FRAMEWORK
Abstract
The presentation seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of interpretation procedure based upon the synthesis of cognitive science and that of pragmatics.
The subject under discussion is the methodology designed to identify speech acts in order to study discourses shaping through the lens of cognitive operations actualized in the specific regulatory activity within the given communicative environment. According to cognitive and pragmatic framework the traditional speech acts taxonomy is unable to solve practical tasks due to its excessive formalism and the lack of intentionality. Intentionality is the essential and fundamental pragmatic concept, instrumental in identifying the nature of a speech act, being its major taxonomic feature.
The basic notions introduced in the investigation are those of surface and deep pragmatic structures of the utterance worked out by analogy with N. Chomsky’s surface and deep syntactical structures. The former ones correlate with the notions of explicature, implicature, and presupposition inferred by the logical action of implication. The technique is based on P. Grice’s talking point emphasizing the difference between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is meant’, which argues for the indirect nature of communication.
With due regard to the presuppositional inference being the form of conceptualized knowledge, the logical action of implication specifies strategies, tactics, and speech acts from cognitive and pragmatic perspective. Speech acts are qualified by the instrumentality of implicatures reflecting the aim, rather than the form of the utterance. Implicatures shape the deep pragmatic structure as opposed to the surface one, actualized by the explicature – the utterance meaning regardless of a specific contextual background. The technique is aimed at working out the structure of deep pragmatic meaning in terms of implicatures, which function as fundamental discursive particles. The methodological validity is achieved by means of step-by-step analysis of the contextual restrictors, which exclude the inference of irrelevant implicatures.
Pride of place goes to the issue of ‘why and what for the utterance is shaped that way’ rather than ‘how the utterance is shaped’. Therefore, any communicative activity is the interegulation of the cognitive (mental) structures of the participants, whereas verbal and nonverbal means perform an instrumental function.
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