The Speaker’s Train of Thought Model

3.4. Three different 'decision models'

3.5. The Speech Act Process Model (under development)

3 1 Proposing Imperative Frames

In accordance with Durst-Andersen’s hypothesis (1995), speech acts in all languages can be ana-lysed on the basis of eight universal imperative frames, all of which instantiate basic units of non-epis-temic modality. As has been mentioned in section 2.4, in contrast to episnon-epis-temic modality, non-episnon-epis-temic modality deals with various types of knowledge, i.e. with laws of nature (alethic modality) and laws of society (deontic modality). While alethic modality bears upon (physical) possibility and impossibility as well as (internal) necessity and non-necessity (in Von Wright’s sense of the term), deontic modality is concerned with permission, prohibition, obligation, and cancellation of obligation. Accordingly, the four alethic types of modality make up four ‘descriptive’ imperative frames and the four deontic ones include four ‘prescriptive’ imperative frames. It is worth pointing out that ‘possibility’ is the underlying primitive of the eight frames. Consider the table below:

[1]

Descriptive frames Prescriptive frames

Possibility Permission (make PSBL)

Impossibility (̴ PSBL) Prohibition (̴ make PSBL)

Necessity (̴ PSBL ̴) Obligation (̴ make PSBL ̴)

Non-necessity (PSBL ̴) Cancellation of obligation (make PSBL ̴)

Following Von Wright, Durst-Andersen (ibid.) maintains that the four alethic frames are de-scriptive by virtue of merely describing what is possible or impossible, necessary or unnecessary. In Searle’s (1983:7) terminology, they have the word-to-world direction of fit, that is, the words match reality; and to the extent that they do or fail to do so, they are called true or false. For example, in formulating her request in terms of possibility, as in Can you pass me the salt, please?, the speaker simply asserts what she believes is physically possible for the hearer to do, notably because there is no obstacle for the hearer to carry out the act: i.e., ‘I hereby ask you whether it is true that it is possible for you to pass me the salt.’

The four deontic frames, on the other hand, are more difficult since they are structurally more complex than the alethic frames. Their complexity is caused by the fact that they do not simply de-scribe what is possible / impossible / necessary / unnecessary, but rather make it possible / impossible

/ necessary / unnecessary for the hearer to carry out an act. Accordingly, a deontic speech act has the so-called world-to-word direction of fit (ibid.): that is, words are not supposed to match reality, but are supposed to induce changes in the world so that the world can be in accord with the propositional content of the speech act. In a classic example of permission, Won’t you sit down?, the speaker makes it possible for the hearer to sit down by removing the existing ‘obstacle’ which is ‘H does not dare to perform an action without the speaker’s permission’. On the level of Output, the speaker puts this into effect by asking whether her assumption: ‘H will not sit down’, – corresponds to the hearer’s actual state of mind (see a detailed discussion in section 3.5.6.5).

Besides being based on the deontic and alethic modality, the eight imperative frames have been given this label because of their complex structure. First and foremost, this relates to Durst-Andersen’s fundamental idea about a speech act: namely, any utterance can be interpreted as consisting – explicitly or implicitly – not just of a single speech act, as traditionally held but of three different speech acts. In his view, each speech act corresponds to one of the three obligatory participants in a communication situation – i.e. speaker, hearer, and reality (see the evidence for this view in sections 3.5.1 & 3.5.2). In his 1995 article, Durst-Andersen provides a description of the imperative frame and its three indepen-dent speech acts.

The Imperative Frame: Pre-conditions, Request, Post-conditions

Consider a description of his seven imperative frames below (from Durst-Andersen, 1995:614):

[2] Prescriptive frames (all involving deontic modality) a. non-negated

1. PERMISSION—REQUEST—ADVICE/*ORDER/etc.

2. OBLIGATION—REQUEST—ORDER/*SUGGESTION/etc.

b. negated

3. PROHIBITION—REQUEST—WARNING/*ADVICE/etc.

4. NON-OBLIGATION—REQUEST—ADVICE/*WARNING/etc.

Descriptive frames (all involving alethic modality) a. non-negated

5. POSSIBILITY—REQUEST—ADVICE/*ORDER/etc.

6. NECESSITY—REQUEST—ORDER/*ADVICE/etc.

b. negated

7. POSSIBILITY—REQUEST—CAUTION/*THREAT

It should be pointed out that 7 in [2] is described in Durst-Andersen (ibid.,631) in terms of the ‘unnecessary and undesired state’, which corresponds to his description of the descriptive imperative frame involving Unnecessity / Non-necessity (Durst-Andersen, 2009:331f). This must imply that the imperative frame having Possibility as its pre-conditions, also called satisfaction conditions, and Caution as its post-conditions, also called obedience conditions, must represent the descriptive frame involving Non-necessity.

Of particular note is the link between satisfaction conditions instantiated by Possibility, Permis-sion, Prohibition, etc. in [2] and the category of aspect in Russian. As mentioned above (see [2.14]

& [2.15]), the perfective aspect is linked to the alethic modality and the imperfective aspect to the deontic modality. This being the case, by describing (i.e. Possibility) or prescribing (i.e. Permission) the final state, a Russian speaker is said to ‘satisf[y] the preconditions for the hearer’s to comply with his request’ (see Durst-Andersen, 1995:628).

Finally, it is important to point out that IF presents a holistic approach to analysing speech acts in that it incorporates three different angles: i.e. the hearer’s point of view, the speaker’s point of view, and even the point of view of reality. More specifically, the hearer perceives the eight imperative frames in [1] in terms of four descriptive and four prescriptive frames. From the speaker’s perspective, the eight frames in [1] divide into polite and impolite frames. From the point of view of reality, the eight imperative frames can be concerned with changing the world or preserving the world as it is at the moment of speech.

In Durst-Andersen 2009, we find a detailed overview of the five frames involving the change in the world in [3] and three frames not involving any change in [4]. It should be mentioned though that

[4] presents a slightly revised version of Durst-Andersen’s (2009:331f) Non-necessity in terms of obe-dience conditions, notably exemplifying Caution. This is mainly related to the fact that Durst-Andersen (1995:614) describes this frame as a negated descriptive frame having Possibility as its satisfaction con-ditions and Caution as its obedience concon-ditions in [2].

[3]

3.1.1. Final comments on Imperative Frames

The IF-approach to speech acts forms the methodological background for devising scenarios for the pilot test as well as the Carlsberg Speech Production Tests. It involves four descriptive and four prescriptive frames grounded, respectively, on the alethic and deontic modality. It is important to emphasise that the description of Durst-Andersen’s eight universal frames and their obligatory speech acts in [2], [3], and [4] takes its point of departure in the distinction between the perfective and im-perfective aspect in Russian. Notably, the imperative frame of Non-necessity (called ‘Possibility (ne-gated)’ in Durst-Andersen, 1995) seems to make good sense in Russian, where the negated perfective imperative construction, like Ne upadi for ‘Mind you don’t fall’ (Durst-Andersen’s example), involves the sequence of speech acts, Possibility—Request—Caution. The English equivalent, however, seems to be a constructed utterance since it rarely occurs in real-life situations. Moreover, I would argue that in contrast to the Russian Ne upadi, the English Mind you don’t fall has Threat, rather than Caution, as its post-conditions. This problematic issue will be addressed in section 5.2, when dealing with the Window situation instantiating Prohibition.

Secondly, the notion of ‘frame’ should be understood as a complex structure involving a number of different categories which the speaker verbalises in the form of separate linguistic units or utteranc-es. Moreover, the complex nature of the frame is stipulated by the trichotomous conceptualisation of speech acts, rendered in terms of the speaker, the hearer, and a specific situation.

Finally, the eight imperative frames proposed by Durst-Andersen (1995; 2009) can be classified in terms of the speaker, the hearer, and reality. From the point of view of the speaker, they are divided into polite frames, thereby expressing compensations (see section 3.5.5.3.1.1), and impolite frames, all involving sanctions (see section 3.5.5.3.1.2). From the hearer’s perspective, the eight frames are divided into four descriptive frames (Possibility, Impossibility, Necessity, and Non-necessity), and four prescriptive frames (Permission, Prohibition, Obligation, and Cancellation of obligation). In terms of reality, they are divided into five frames involving change in the world and three preserving the world as it is at the moment of speech. On the whole, though, IF pays much more attention to the speaker’s active role in communication as opposed to previous theories mostly pointing to the hearer’s ability to recover the speaker’s speech intention (cf. Grice, 1975, 1978; Brown & Levinson, 1978; Sperber &

Wilson, 1986). From this perspective, it provides a more elaborate framework to analyse the speaker’s different choices of direct as well as indirect speech acts.

3 2 The Speaker’s Train of Thought Model

The idea about speech acts as complex structures was applied for the first time in Arnsberg &

Bentsen’s (2006) empirical cross-cultural study of requests. Building upon IF, the researchers devised a model, termed the ‘Speaker’s Train of Thought Model’, which enabled them to analyse various re-quests in terms of different categories arranged in a logical order corresponding to the speaker’s train of thought. The basic idea is that any category in a sequence is dependent on the preceding one, and every element in a linguistic realisation is a verbalisation of one of these categories. According to Arns-berg and Bentsen (2009:66), the speaker will normally start with tuner and end with justification (see [5]). This, however, does not imply that the speaker will always begin with tuner. At any point, she can verbalise any other category from the wheel, depending on which step in the wheel she enters. Overall, the STT-model makes up a frame, and any speech act is thought to be an index pointing to a particular step within that frame.

[5] The Speaker’s Train of Thought (from Arnsberg & Bentsen, 2009:66)

In the data collected by Arnsberg and Bentsen (ibid.), many instances of requests did not consist of a single utterance. In most cases, they consisted of several utterances. Interestingly, the MTD and the ELFD in the present study similarly exhibited a great number of lengthy responses, comprising between one and ten different utterances. Therefore, I shall in the following employ the term

‘com-municative event’ instead of ‘utterance’, thereby taking into account the fact that requests can involve more than one utterance.

Moreover, the STT-model incorporates the IF-approach to speech acts as essentially tripartite entities and therefore includes three basic categories, namely, obedience conditions, satisfaction condi-tions, and compliance conditions or simply the imperative form, which stand for the three different speech acts defined in relation to the three obligatory participants in a communication situation:

[6]

Speaker (1st prs.) – obedience conditions Hearer (2nd prs.) – satisfaction conditions Reality (3rd prs.) – compliance conditions

It should be pointed out that in semiotic terms, the speaker’s conditions to the hearer correspond to the function of a Symptom, the hearer’s conditions fulfill the function of a Signal, and the last set of conditions is equivalent to the function of a Model (see a detailed discussion of a speech act defined in terms of Symptom, Signal, and Model in section 3.5.3).

Moreover, this model can be said to be essentially phenomenological in that it deals with the linguistic data in a particular way defined by its categories. This seems to be its prime weakness in that other analytical tools may approach the data in a different way and elicit other interpretations.

Inasmuch as the present study employs a revised version of the STT-model, I shall not here describe its individual categories in detail. It will suffice to mention that the point of departure for developing the SAP-model has been the work of Arnsberg and Bentsen (ibid.) and the IF-approach to speech acts.