Pragmatic acts and schema theory

It will be clear by now that speech acts are not fixed by the words or behaviors with which they are performed. Furthermore, speech acts have fuzzy edges. An assertion can easily shade into advice, which can shade into a request or a warning. It is difficult to specify where one speech act ends and the next begins. Moreover, speakers may intend speech acts to be indeterminate (i.e. resistant to classification). As Leech (1983: 23–24) neatly puts it:

The indeterminacy of conversational utterances ... shows itself in the NEGOTIABILITY of pragmatic factors; that is, by leaving the force unclear, S may leave H the opportunity to choose between one force and another, and thus leaves part of the responsibility of the meaning to H. For instance,

“If I were you I’d leave town straight away”

can be interpreted according to the context as a piece of advice, a warning, or a threat. Here H, knowing something about S’s likely intentions, may interpret it as a threat, and act on it as such; but S will always be able to claim that it was a piece of advice, given from the friendliest of motives. In this way, the “rhetoric of conversation” may show itself in S’s ability to have his cake and eat it.

However, despite this, many speech act theorists fail to take proper account of indeterminacy in their theoretical and methodological models. Of course, we should not exaggerate indeterminacy, vagueness, ambiguity and so on, since communication is successful by and large – and we are not constantly lost in a fog of indeterminacy. This leads to a second issue: how is it that interlocutors (and analysts!) recognize examples like Leech’s as either a piece of advice, a warning or a threat in the first place?

Mey (2001, 2010) argues that it is primarily through the context in his proposed pragmatic act theory. Note the term “pragmatic act”. The term “speech act” is something of a misnomer. As noted, we can do communicative acts in writing or even non-verbally. Mey suggests that what makes a particular pragmatic act recognizable is a set of conditions or “affordances”:

For any activity to be successful, it has to be “expected”, not just in the sense that somebody is waiting for the act to be performed, but rather in a general sense: this particular kind of act is apposite in this particular discursive interaction. (Mey 2010: 445)

In other words, social actions are dependent on the “situation being able to ‘carry’ them” (ibid.). Indeed, note that the Leech example above lacks a context to help determine, at least to a degree, the pragmatic act. The question is, then, what is it about a particular situation that generates these affordances? Mey himself proposes the notion of “pragmeme”, a kind of “general situational prototype capable of being executed in a situation” (2001: 221). The notion of “meme” draws from the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s (1991) proposal that we absorb memes from surrounding culture, including ideas, stories, songs, methods, theories and so on.3 A pragmeme is said to consist of an activity part and a textual part, which, when instantiated in a particular situated context, constitutes an “individuated, individual pragmatic act”, or what Mey terms a “pract” (2001: 221). While this goes some way to helping us better understand that speech acts are inherently situated, we are still left with the question of how to formalize these conditions or affordances.

Our approach echoes that of Mey, except that we attempt to specify more precisely what it means for a situation to be able to “carry” a pragmatic act. Following Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000), we propose that pragmatic acts be viewed as fuzzy, complex concepts that can vary both synchronically and diachronically across multiple dimensions in the pragmatic space that they share with neighboring acts (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000: 74, 92). Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000: 74) also suggest that a prototype approach is required. We would endorse this. Prototype theory (see Rosch 1975) constitutes an alternative approach to Aristotelian categories, one that is not based on necessary and sufficient conditions, as seems to be the case with Searle’s felicity conditions, but on typical features as acquired through experience. For example, for the category “bird” the ability to fly might be taken as a necessary feature, but that would exclude an ostrich, which nevertheless has some birdlike features (e.g. feathers). Prototype theory offers proper theoretical status to such gradience, and takes account of the varied nature and complexity of criteria for category membership: of formal, functional and affective factors; of culturally specific and goal-derived criteria; and of appropriateness conditions (cf. Coleman and Kay 1981). However, a limitation of prototype theory is that it has been developed in relation to single categories or simple hierarchies of categories. Schema theory, as introduced, is compatible with prototype theory, but tends to consider clusters of categories organized in complex structures. It is thus better suited to accounting for pragmatic acts (note that the notion of illocutionary scenario, mentioned in a reflection box, is a very similar approach). In fact, in one variant, that of Schank and Abelson (1977), schema theory is designed to account for appropriate sequences of actions in a particular context, something that is consistent with the kind of view we develop.

Let us illustrate how this might work in relation to a request. Searle’s (1969: 66) felicity conditions for a request provide a useful starting point for outlining the possible features that might contribute to the constitution of a request, and so we present them here:

However, the above conditions do not encompass all the possible formal, co-textual and contextual features that can be associated with requests. Indeed, pulling together relevant features mentioned in the literature reveals the following (references can be found in Culpeper and Archer 2008):

Formal features

• Particular conventionalized pragmalinguistic strategies (or IFIDs)

• A future action is specified in some proposition

Contextual beliefs

• It is not obvious that that future action will be performed by the target in the normal course of events

• It is not obvious that the target is obliged to perform the future action or the speaker is obliged to ask for the future action to be performed in the normal course of events

• The target is able to undertake the future action

• The target is willing to undertake the future action

• The source of the speech act wants the target to do the future act

• The target takes the source’s desire for the future act as the reason to act

Interpersonal beliefs

• The future action represents benefit for the source but cost for the target

• The speaker is likely to be of relatively high status

Co-textual features

• Author: Pre-request

• Target: Unmarked compliance/marked non-compliance

Outcomes (i.e. perlocutionary effects)

• Target performs the action specified in the earlier speech act

The above describes the schema for the pragmatic act of request. Space precludes illustrating all these features. How the schema is constituted will be dependent on cultural context, a point we made. As we noted, for example, the repetition of apology IFIDs seems to be more central to the Chinese apology than the English one. Furthermore, the schema-theoretic approach helps us account for empirical findings. Also, we observed the findings of Holtgraves (1994) that knowing a speaker is of high status makes it more likely that you will take what they say as a request. This can be explained by the fact that high status is associated with requestive activity. Active schemata form expectations and such expectations help us interpret and predict the complexities of the world. Schema theory researchers have made the point that what you see is, in part, determined by what you expect to see (e.g. Neisser 1976: 20–21).

We will return to a schema-theoretic approach to pragmatic acts, where we show how it can be fused with more interactional notions in the guise of activity types.