Linguistic structure beyond grammar: speech acts and language teaching

Abstract

Recent studies in Speech Acts have shown that the message and meaning of an utterance (i.e. the illocutionary force of an utterance) may vary according to context. Thus an English utterance such as "It's cold here!" may have the illocutionary force of, for example, a request (for someone to regulate temperature in a room by closing or opening the windows, depending on outside temperature), or a joke, neither of which is associated with the conventional meaning of the declarative statement contained in the utterance. Similarly the illocutionary force of denial in another more complex example such as "If he is a Singaporean then I am the Queen of Sheba!" cannot be traced to any obvious grammatical negation. A simple comparison of English with Southeast Asian languages will reveal similarities and differences in the structure of illocutionary forces and one area of crucial difficulty for second language learning. Linguistic research in this area has convincingly shown the need to analyze language beyond the abstract ideal situation envisaged by the Chomskyan school of linguistics. There are many implications for applied linguistics and language teaching, especially from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. It can be shown, for example, that effective language teaching should go beyond the traditional instruction of conventional grammar to include that of the grammar of Speech Acts in the target language.