Grounding, semantic motivation, and conceptual interaction in indirect directive speech acts (original) (raw)

2002, Journal of Pragmatics

In this paper we attempt to develop the still programmatic but insightful proposal made by Thomburg and Panther (1997) and , according to which the identification of the intended meaning (or illocutionary force) of indirect requests (and by extension of indirect speech acts in general) is based on conceptual metonymies operating on the grounds of the different components of illocutionary scenarios. We build into Panther and Thornburg's account other aspects of indirect directives which they have not considered yet. Thus we examine issues such as the semantic motivation of indirect directives, the prototypicality degrees of the constructions used to convey them, their instantiation potential, their image-schematic basis, and the cognitive motivation of some of their features in discourse. We argue that calculating the illocutionary force of an utterance is ultimately a matter of conceptual interaction between propositional, image-schematic, metonymic, and metaphorical idealized cognitive models or ICMs. 0 teach linguistics at the University of La Rioja (Spain). They have done research on pragmatics, and on cognitive and functional linguistics and collaborate with researchers from the universities of La Rioja, Castelhm, and Murcia in the study of frame semantics, metaphor, and metonymy, and their relationships with the various levels of grammatical explanation, on the one hand, and with pragmatic inferencing, on the other. Professor Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza coordinates work by some of these researchers on redeveloping frame semantics theory in terms of relational networks and their interaction with metaphoric, metonymic and image-schematic models. Dr. Lorena Perez has carried out extensive research into speech act theory, especially from the point of view of cognitive modelling.