Keywords
Abstract
It is worth noting that the sentences we use in daily communication are not solely intended to send information to others. Instead, they also perform other communicative functions, like requesting, promising, thanking, ordering, apologizing, advising, describing, etc. Altogether, these communicative functions constitute a speech act theory. This article is devoted to the exploration of communicative speech acts, one of the fundamental concepts in pragmatics. It includes a brief explanation of pragmatics followed by a detailed analysis of five distinctive speech acts -assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative - based on John Searle’s framework. Several practical examples together with certain performative verbs relevant to each speech act are provided.
References
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