Harmless Drudgery

I really enjoyed my day spent with Wierzbicka, Anna, English Speech Act Verbs: A semantic dictionary (Marrickville, Academic Press Australia, 1987).

An Australian writing about English. Mmmm.

The work is a Dictionary of Speech Act Verbs with 37 groups of English speech act verbs. It aims to be both a theoretical and practical work: a reference dictionary for the general public, learners and teachers of English and seeks to advance and justify the semantic theory on which it is based .

Here are some highlights and jottings arising:

Linguists tend to see themselves as the elite with lexographers as the unassuming and unflamboyant contributors to scholarship, Johnson’s “harmless drudge”s. (p2)

The 21^st C may become the era of the dictionary. “From being an assiduous study of the grammatical skeleton of language and of its sounds linguistic analysis may at last become a holistic study of the entire organism, including, if one may say so, its lexical flesh.” (p2)

All of Life is Speech Acts

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that public life can be conceived as a gigantic network of speech acts. History itself seems to consist largely in acts of speech (threats, condemnations, offers, demands, negotiations, agreements, and so on).” (p3)

“… people’s private lives, too, consist to a phenomenal extent of speech acts.” (p3)

Circularity of all traditional dictionaries (p5) In the Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978) a deliberate attempt is made to minimise this circularity, with every of the 40 000 to 50 000 words in the dictionary defined in terms of only about 2000 words, including 60 speech act verbs, (p5) whereas English has about 300 speech act verbs (p6). The meaning of different words is more alluded to than spelt out.

Many Speech Act Books

“Since the publication of J. L. Austin’s How to do things with words (1962), speech acts have attracted an enormous amount of attention – from linguists, philosopshers, psycologists, anthropologists and sociologists. The bibliography of works devoted to this topic is enormous, and is growing each year.” (p7f)

Thinking in Words?

Searle (1979:ix): “Illocutionary acts are, so to speak, natural conceptual kinds, and we should no more suppose that our ordinary language verbs carve the conceptual field of illocutions at its semantic joints than we would suppose that our ordinary language expressions for naming and describing plants and animals correspond exactly to the natural biological kinds.” (p9) – [except if we think in words? Intentions / innate concepts / states of mind?]

Words come from cultural ideas as differences between languages show (p10)

Components of meaning / Definitions

“… instead of comparing an unidentified meaning with various other meanings, one could simply identify it, by enumerating all its constituents.” (p11) – decomposition – breaking down the word (p11) – reductive paraphrases to conceptual building blocks (p12)

“say” is regarded as irreducible here. No other speech act is contained in the definition of another.

The golden dream of lexographers, which they usually regard as unobtainable that, in Johnson’s words a definition should employ “terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained”. (quoted on p13 from LDOCE 1984:xi)

Charles Richardson dictionary by exemplification in quotations only not definitions (p19 citing Murray 1970:44)

Negative examples in dictionaries - show how words cannot be used (p20)

A definition is a linguistic hypothesis (p20) [falsification not proof]

Do you agree that the following definitions are not necessarily so?

Calculate can only be used when numbers are in mind; one cannot boast to oneself; neither rebuking nor reprimanding can be done gently; reprimanding is official to a subordinate rather than personal whereas reporving is purley didactic not punitive and can be done gently but not sharply (p21)

“… speech act verbs can differ from one another as to the ‘degree of performativity’ (Verschueren 1985)

Variations in degree of force (p22)

Dictionaries are for meanings of words. Encyclopedia are for information.

“The whole vocabulary of speech act verbs constitutes a network of interrelated networks, and there is no way it can be neatly divided into non-arbitary classes.” (p28)

“… the vocabulary of speech act verbs dosen’t have a hierarchical structure and cannot be represented as a set of ‘basic words’… and their ‘hyponyms’ (subkinds)…. The detailed analysis of more than 250 speech act verbs shows that there isn’t a single pair of verbs among them which would be related in the way flower and rose, oak and tree, or parrot and bird are related…. speech act verbs … don’t have the kind of “taxonomic” structure characteristic of words for animals and plants. The semantic relations between them are always more complicated than that.” (p29)

“The main value and the main interest of a work like the present one must consist in its portrayal of the semantic links between related words.” (p29)

Semi-arbitary classes and orderings (p29)

“… verbs such as chide, chastise and upbraid have been left out.” (p31)

“Still, the main goal of preparing a ‘real dictionary’ rather than a sample has been achieved: despite the exclusion of the more marginal members of the field, one can still say, I think, that the field of English speech act verbs has been, essentially, covered.” (p31)

“Ultimately, this metalanguage is based on a minimal set of fifteen ‘semantic primitives’, i.e. elementary conceptual building blocks, which are not defined themselves, and in terms of which all other words (and constructions) are defined. This set includes the following elements: I, you, someone, something, this, want, not want, think (of), say, imagine, know, place, part, world, and become (cf. Wierzbicka 1972, 1980a and b, and 1985a).” (p31)

See Appendix for all undefined wds used in dictionary- Metalexacon of 50 or 60 words

Re-use of words shows they have good value (p32)

Consistency of use facilitates comparison

Balance of readability and semantic adequacy of explanations (p32)