Directives

9 Key excerpts on "Directives"

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  Speech Acts in English

  From Research to Instruction and Textbook Development

  • Lorena Pérez-Hernández(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 1 Introduction 1.1 Teaching Directive Speech Acts: Is There Room for Improvement? Every day of our lives we use language to tell stories, to express feelings, to describe the world, and also, as was lucidly revealed by Austin (1962) in his book How to Do Things with Words, to perform actions. There are some things we do physically with our hands or legs, and others we do verbally by means of words. One essential thing we can do and often do primarily by means of language is to try to influence other people into a certain path of action. Thus, we can move them to do something in their benefit (by advising or warning them), in our own benefit (by ordering, requesting, or begging them), or in mutual benefit (i.e. by suggesting a common course of action). Actions of this kind, which we carry out linguistically and which have as their main objective to prompt our interlocutors to do something, are known in the literature as directive speech acts. Directives are ubiquitous. We start producing them as soon as we learn to speak and, for the rest of our lives, we use them on a daily basis. Directives are useful because they allow us to attain our goals by persuading or pushing other people to act according to our wishes, but they are not free from risks. Using directive acts inappropriately can offend our interlocutors. As a result, the directive act may turn out to be ineffective and our goals may end up unfulfilled. Alternatively, we may succeed in getting the listener to carry out the desired action but at a high social cost. Human interaction is very sensitive to the use of Directives, which are a potential source of interpersonal conflict. Learning to produce directive speech acts correctly in a second or foreign language is a crucial but difficult task.

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  Diminutives in English

  • Klaus P. Schneider(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  160 5.2. Directive acts 5.2.1. Interactional characterisation and specification Directive speech acts have probably received more attention than any other speech act, par-ticularly in empirical pragmatics (cf., e.g., Ervin-Tripp 1976, Hindelang 1978, Blum-Kulka et al. 1985, Blum-Kulka 1987, Aijmer 1996: ch. 4). 12 One reason for this may be that direc-tives are considered central for human communication (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989a). Wunderlich (1978) assumes that from a phylogentic perspective, Directives and vocatives (cf. 5.1.) can be regarded as the primary illocutionary types. While vocatives steer merely the attention of the addressee, Directives also steer the actions of the addressee (cf. Wunder-lich 1978: 79). Following Searle (1976), the purpose or point of a directive speech act can be defined as an attempt by a speaker to get the hearer to do something (cf. also Searle/ Vanderveken 1985). Since the predicated action lies in the future relative to the moment of speaking, 13 the 'direction of fit' of directive acts is 'world-to-words' (Searle 1976). In other words, reality ('the world') is to be changed in such a way that it matches the proposition ('the words') of the directive act. The hearer is expected to bring about this matching by performing the predicated action after the moment of speaking. 14 The discussion of Directives has largely concentrated on requests. Requests are Directives which are in the speaker's interest, while giving advice, for instance, is in the hearer's in-terests (cf. Schneider 1980). With reference to Leech's (1983) 'cost-benefit scale', requests can be defined more precisely as speech acts which are at a cost to the addressee and to the benefit of the speaker. Accordingly, House and Kasper (1987: 1254) formulate the interac-tional characteristics of requests as follows: 'S wants H to do ρ / ρ is at a cost to H'.

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  Language and Gender in Children's Animated Films

  Exploring Disney and Pixar

  • Carmen Fought, Karen Eisenhauer(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Directives Let me rephrase that. Take me up the North Mountain. . . Please. Anna, Frozen Introduction Directives are one of the basic building blocks of communication. Directives are defined as speech acts in which a speaker attempts to get the recipient to carry out or refrain from action. Other speech acts we’ve selected, like insults, compliments, and apologies, are all important for us to function socially with one another – but none of them are quite as common or essential to everyday life as Directives. As Goodwin and Cekaite (2013) say, they “constitute a very basic way in which tasks and everyday life get organized” (123). Directives are a fascinating lens through which to look at gender because their use in everyday life is very closely tied to power. Directives are essen- tially the request that someone change their course of action to fit the speaker’s desire. So, how and when we choose to give such a request has a lot to do with whether or not we think a listener will comply – in other words, how much power we have over them. Formal power structures in school or the workplace, familial relationships, and social hierarchies are all in part constructed through the regulation of Directives: the fact that teachers give Directives to students freely, but not the other way around, is a fundamental building block of how a classroom works. Less formally, personality traits related to power or assertion (e.g. being passive, aggressive, bossy, demure, and the like) are built and perceived in large part around how and when a speaker chooses to direct others. Of course, power – formal or informal – can have a lot to do with gender. Women in particular struggle with gaining and holding institutional power, and it has been noted that socially, women can often find themselves trapped between appearing “powerful” or appearing “feminine.” In this struggle, some women have begun to police their own (and other women’s) use of Directives.

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  English as a Lingua Franca in Higher Education

  A Longitudinal Study of Classroom Discourse

  • Ute Smit(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, consider-ations of politeness in the following analysis of Directives should be understood as those of appropriateness. In view of the many investigations focusing on Directives, it is not surprising to find that the key concepts have been used in various, partly overlapping ways. It is therefore deemed necessary to define them as they are employed here and delineate in how far this differs from other relevant studies (6.2.1). This will be followed by a critical assessment of the conceptual complexities involved in using and analysing control acts (6.2.2) and questions (6.2.3). 6.2 Conceptual background 231 6.2.1 On defining directive Since the early days of speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), ‘directive’ has been defined as capturing all communicative acts which are “attempts [. . . ] by the speaker to get the hearer to do something” (Searle 1976: 11). While other terms – notably request – have been used instead of or together with directive in later studies (Vine 2004: 24), its basic meaning has remained relatively intact. Where different interpretations became apparent, it concerned what the hearers were supposed to do. As discussed in detail in Vine (2004: 23–26), Searle’s orig-inal conception included verbal and non-verbal action on the hearer’s part, but subsequent researchers tended to handle the notion divergently. Some followed Searle (e.g. Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989; Ellis 1992), while others restricted Directives to non-verbal actions either implicitly (Ervin-Tripp 1976) or explicitly (e.g. Jones 1992). This was also true of classroom-based research of the early days (e.g. Holmes 1983), which followed Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) explicit distinction between elicitation (requiring a verbal response) and directive (requiring a non-verbal response).

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  Japanese at Work

  Politeness, Power, and Personae in Japanese Workplace Discourse

  • Haruko Minegishi Cook, Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith, Haruko Minegishi Cook, Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  © The Author(s) 2018

  Haruko Minegishi Cook and

  Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith (eds.)

  Japanese at Work Communicating in Professions and Organizations https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63549-1_8

  Begin Abstract

  8. Directives in Japanese Workplace Discourse

  Naomi Geyer

  1   

  (1) Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

   

    Naomi Geyer

  End Abstract

  1 Introduction

  This chapter explores several different forms speaker use when issuing Directives in Japanese workplace discourse. Directives are “utterances designed to get someone to do something” (Goodwin 2006 , 517), including actions such as requests, suggestions, proposals, and so on. Such utterances are ubiquitous in workplace discourse as well as in daily conversations. As such, they are one of the most studied speech acts in the fields of pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics.

  1.1 Politeness, Power, and Community

  Researchers have adopted several different approaches to Directives touching upon various concepts such as politeness, power, social setting, indirectness, entitlement, and contingency. Among them, a prevalent line of research on Directives and requests is linguistic politeness theory, as represented by Brown and Levinson’s (1987 ) proposal. Brown and Levinson claim that politeness, a manifestation of respect for the interlocutor’s “face (the public self-image),” can be found in various languages, that it supports the orderliness of social interaction, and that it is consequently one of the essential foundations of human social life. A directive, within this framework, is considered a face-threatening act due to the fact that it imposes on the recipient. Researchers have focused on the range of politeness strategies, or special linguistic devices, used to mitigate face threats caused by requests and Directives (e.g., Blum-Kulka 1987 ; Clark and Schunk 1980 ; Craig et al. 1986 ; Francik and Clark 1985 ; Gagne 2010 ; Rinnert and Kobayashi 1999

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  Pragmatics of Speech Actions

  • Marina Sbisà, Ken Turner, Marina Sbisà, Ken Turner(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  An often-quoted example is the Australian language Nunggu-buyu, where Directives are formally undistinguishable from future indicatives (Heath 1984), but lack of morphological imperative seems to be an widespread fea-ture in languages spoken in South-East Asia and in the Khosian family (van der Auwera and Lejeune 2005). On the other hand, some languages have morpho-syntactically homogenous hortative-imperative paradigms (van der Auwera, Dobrushina and Goussev 2005, see Croft 1994 for similar points). That is, in these languages the same grammati-cal types are used to issue directive speech acts directed at the addressee (“Go”), and requests addressed at a third person (“Let him go”). (While the former are tra- Speech act classifications 191 ditionally called “imperative”, the latter are more often dubbed “hortative” or “jussive”, rather than “third-person imperatives”.) For instance, in Mongolian (Kuzmenkov 2001), the verb bears no morphological marking of person or number, except in imperative/hortative constructions. To be sure, one may relax the defini-tion of the directive force in order to group together requests directed to any person, and not specifically to the addressee (Birjulin and Xrakovski 2001). In such a way, both imperatives and hortatives would belong to the category of directive speech acts. However, in many languages such a categorisation would not be linguistically motivated, for the equivalents of hortative forms should be classified as instances of the declarative sentence type. For instance, in French, third-person directed requests are in subjunctive mood. Yet, formally, the French subjunctive clearly be-longs to the declarative sentence type. While in French the presence of an overt subject is not allowed in imperative sentences, it is compulsory in both main-clause subjunctives and indicatives.

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  Illocutionary Shell Nouns in English

  • Carla Vergaro(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  Synchronic studies mostly focus on cross-cultural descriptions of variations, among languages and varieties of the same language, of single directive speech acts or in comparison to other speech acts 1 See Kissine (2016) for an overview. 2 See also section 5.3.1. 152 (for example, some of the most recent are Fukushima 2000; Breuer and Geluykens 2007; Barron 2008; Taleghani-Nikazm 2010; Walker 2013; Flöck 2016), on the acquisition of directive speech acts in a particular language (for example, Alcón and Safont 2001; Matsumura 2001, 2003), or on the use of directive speech acts in specific genres (for example, Gill, Halkwoski and Roberts 2001; Geluykens 2008, 2011; Vine 2009). Diachronic studies have focused especially on the evolution of directive speech acts in specific genres through time (see, for example, Busse 2002; Kohnen 2002, 2008, 2009; Culpeper and Archer 2008; Moessner 2010). As for directive verbs, Leech discusses the “conditionality factor” (1983: 219), i.e. the fact that the event does not take place unless the hearer agrees or indicates compliance, and the assumptions the speaker has about this. However, he points out that, if this is the pragmatic definition, semantically, when one reports a linguistic action, the conditionality of P determines the choice of one lexical item instead of another. As we have already seen, some commissive acts (offer, volunteering and bid) can also be defined as “conditional”. However, this dimension is particularly important for the semantic analysis of directive shell nouns because, if comparatively what differentiates commissive shell nouns is how binding a reported act is, in the case of directive shell nouns it is the degree of influence that the reported directive act can exert over the directee that distinguishes them. Hence, this factor will be taken into account in our analysis of directive shell nouns.

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  Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics

  A Mutualistic Entente

  • Jesús Romero-Trillo(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  A cross-linguistic study on the pragmatics of intonation in Directives M. Dolores Ramírez-Verdugo This article explores the prosodic realization of Directives and its pragmatic effects in classroom discourse. It analyzes the communicative meaning trans-mitted by the intonation patterns used in scripted dialogues in comparison with the patterns used in natural classroom discourse by native and non-native (Spanish) teachers of English in the UAMLESC Corpus. The results reveal the existence of prosodic differences in the choice of intonation pat-terns produced by the two language groups in experimental and naturalistic speech, and hence, differences on the pragmatic meaning transmitted in similar communicative contexts. 1. Introduction: Directives and intonation The aim of this paper is to explore the prosodic realization of native and non-native teacher’s Directives as a dimension of interpersonal discourse management in classrooms where English is used as the medium of instruc-tion in both high- and low- immersion programmes in Madrid. As proto-typical speech acts occurring in a classroom, Directives have been studied in depth from different linguistic perspectives (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Ervin-Tripp 1982; Sinclair and Brazil 1982; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Andersen 1990; Trosborg 1995; among others). However, to our knowl-edge, they have been hardly analysed from a pragmatic-prosodic view (cf. Dalton-Puffer 2003). Yet, a preliminary analysis of experimental data and bilingual classroom discourse, based on two cross-linguistic corpora of na-tive and non-native (Spanish) speakers and teachers of English, indicates that prosody plays important role in establishing pragmatic meaning and participants’ relationship in classroom interaction. According to Halliday (1994: 68–69), in Directives ‘the exchange com-modity is strictly non-verbal: what is being demanded (or given) is an ob-ject or an action, and language is brought in to help the process along’.

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  Imperatives

  • Mark Jary, Mikhail Kissine(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The existence of a distinct imperative sentence type would then draw a line between languages that have a means of literally expressing directive force and those that have not. However, as we saw in Chapter 2 (section 3), this would mean that, in languages without imperative mood, all directive speech acts are indirect, which is quite an unpalatable consequence. The only option left would then be to argue that the Principle of Expressibility does not preclude polysemy, so that both languages with, and those without, an imperative form possess sentence types dedi- cated to the literal and direct performance of directive speech acts, but in the latter these sentence types are also dedicated for the literal performance of speech acts of another kind. We have already seen what the problem with such a proposal would be (Chapter 2 (section 3)): once ‘illocutionary’ polysemy of sentence types is allowed, The imperative is directive force 171 it is difficult to maintain that genuinely indirect requests, such as (1) or (2), are not ambiguous between several literal illocutionary forces. In other words, recognising illocutionary ambiguity opens the way to analysing such cases as direct speech acts. (2) You’re leaving tomorrow. However, Searle (1975a: 269) says that ‘it is intuitively apparent’ that indirect speech acts like (1) are not ambiguous, and goes on to suggest that ‘an ordinary application of Occam’s Razor places the onus of proof on those that wish to claim that theses sentences are ambiguous’. Occam’s Razor advises against positing entities without necessity. Applied to linguistic analysis, this translates in an edict against postulating senses without necessity. What the previous discussion shows, though, is that Searle’s speech act theory actually pushes us towards positing more ‘illocutionary senses’ than are required by theories that do not treat imperatives as encoding directive force.

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