“Is that a request or a command?”: Speech act meta discourse and illocutionary indeterminacy

Abstract

In everyday conversations, speakers sometimes find it necessary to negotiate the precise speech act value of an utterance and clarify whether a particular utterance was meant as a request or a command, for instance, or whether an evaluation of another person was meant as a compliment or as an insult. Such meta discursive interactions are indicative of a general illocutionary indeterminacy. Speech acts are regularly underdetermined as to their precise illocutionary point, that is to say, speakers need not be entirely clear about the precise speech act value of their utterances. It is sufficient to be good enough for current purposes. In the case of a misjudgement as to what is good enough for current purposes, explicit negotiations might be in order. In this article, I sketch a preliminary theory of illocutionary indeterminacy and provide some empirical evidence for common ways of negotiating the illocutionary potential of an utterance. This evidence is derived from collocational patterns of selected names of speech acts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).