What the meta-illocutionary lexicon can tell us about speech act taxonomies

Abstract

Being firmly situated within speech act theory and language philosophy, research on speech act taxonomies (Searle, 1975) takes a second-order approach to distinguishing superordinate function types of utterances, thus largely ignoring first-order perspectives. First-order pragmatics, on the other hand, is dominated by studies on ordinary language users’ conceptualizations of speech acts in isolation (Schneider, 2022; [Schoppa, 2022]). The present study seeks to extend the scope of first-order pragmatics by exploring ordinary usage patterns of the meta-illocutionary lexicon regarding three directive illocutions (requesting, commanding, begging) and three expressive illocutions (thanking, apologizing, congratulating). While these usage patterns directly reflect first-order conceptualizations of (the felicity of) the respective illocutions, they are further argued to collectively constitute indirect evidence for first-order conceptualizations of the relevant speech act classes. Based on blogging data from the GloWbE corpus, results include that while references to directive illocutions tend to favor the descriptive use type of the meta-illocutionary lexicon, references to expressive illocutions are generally dominated by the performative use type. These and other findings are discussed against the background of speech act taxonomies, conventionalization, and the situatedness of speech acts in discourse, among other things.