F OLI A L I NGUI NGUI STI CA ET L I TTER TT ERAR ARII A : A SOPII S ZA NA UKU O JEZI KU I Č ASOP
KNJIŽEVNOSTI KNJIŽEVNOSTI (7)
Institut za jezik i književnost Filozofski fakultet, Nikšić Univerzitet Crne Gore
FOLIA LINGUISTICA ET LITTERARIA: Časopis za nauku o jeziku i književnost i FOL I A L I NGUI STI CA ET L I TTERARI A: Journal of Language Language and Li terary terary Studie Studies s
Glavni ur ednik / General General Editor:
Marija Krivokapić Knežević
Izdavač: Institut za jezik i književnost, Filozofski F ilozofski fakultet, Nikšić P hilosophy, Nikšić Publisher: Institute for Language and Literatu re, Faculty of Philosophy, Uređivački odbor / Board of Editors: Rossella Abbaticchio, University of Bari Aleksandra Banjević, University of Montenegro Nick Ceramella, University for Foreigners of Perugia Vesna Vukićević Janković, University of Montenegro Mo ntenegro Ginette Katz-Roy, Pairs West University Nanterre La Défense Bernhard Kettemann, University of Graz Jelena Knežević, University of Montenegro Radmila Lazarević University of Montenegro Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević, University of Montenegro Ana Pe janović, University of Montengero Ljiljana Pajović Dujović, University of Montenegr Dirk Skiba, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena Sekr Sekr etar / Secretar Secretar y:
Petar Božović, University of Montenegro Recenze Recenzent nt i / Reviewed by:
Dragan Bogojević, University of Montenegro Anette Đurović, University of Belgrade Rajka Glušica, University of Montenegro Biljana Milatović, Milatović, University of Montenegro Biljana Mišić Ilić, University of Niš Mark Oparin, Udmurt State University, Izhevsk Petar Penda, University of Banja Luka Deja Piletić, Unviersity of Montenegro Biljana Radić Bojanić, Unviersity of Novi Sad Violeta Stojičić, University of Niš Sanja Šubarić, University of Montenegro Radojka Vukčević, University of Belgrade Grafički dizajn / Graphic Design: Biljana Živković, Studio Mouse Štampa / Printed by: ITP Kolo, Nikšić : 1000 Copies © Filozofski fakultet, Nikšić, 201 3
FOLIA LINGUISTICA ET LITTERARIA: Časopis za nauku o jeziku i književnost i FOL I A L I NGUI STI CA ET L I TTERARI A: Journal of Language Language and Li terary terary Studie Studies s
Glavni ur ednik / General General Editor:
Marija Krivokapić Knežević
Izdavač: Institut za jezik i književnost, Filozofski F ilozofski fakultet, Nikšić P hilosophy, Nikšić Publisher: Institute for Language and Literatu re, Faculty of Philosophy, Uređivački odbor / Board of Editors: Rossella Abbaticchio, University of Bari Aleksandra Banjević, University of Montenegro Nick Ceramella, University for Foreigners of Perugia Vesna Vukićević Janković, University of Montenegro Mo ntenegro Ginette Katz-Roy, Pairs West University Nanterre La Défense Bernhard Kettemann, University of Graz Jelena Knežević, University of Montenegro Radmila Lazarević University of Montenegro Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević, University of Montenegro Ana Pe janović, University of Montengero Ljiljana Pajović Dujović, University of Montenegr Dirk Skiba, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena Sekr Sekr etar / Secretar Secretar y:
Petar Božović, University of Montenegro Recenze Recenzent nt i / Reviewed by:
Dragan Bogojević, University of Montenegro Anette Đurović, University of Belgrade Rajka Glušica, University of Montenegro Biljana Milatović, Milatović, University of Montenegro Biljana Mišić Ilić, University of Niš Mark Oparin, Udmurt State University, Izhevsk Petar Penda, University of Banja Luka Deja Piletić, Unviersity of Montenegro Biljana Radić Bojanić, Unviersity of Novi Sad Violeta Stojičić, University of Niš Sanja Šubarić, University of Montenegro Radojka Vukčević, University of Belgrade Grafički dizajn / Graphic Design: Biljana Živković, Studio Mouse Štampa / Printed by: ITP Kolo, Nikšić : 1000 Copies © Filozofski fakultet, Nikšić, 201 3
SADRŽAJ / TABLE OF CONTENTS Nauka o jeziku / Language Studies
Conventionality in Illocutionary Acts and Relevance Theory Bledar Toska ------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 Rhetorical Conventions in Written Discourse: Focusing on Coherence Emilija Sarzhoska-Georgievska ------------------------------------------------------------- 19 Nominal Compounds and Nominal Phrases – Phrases – A A Look from English into SCBM Vesna Bulatović--------------Bulatović--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 35 What Standard Written Norms of English Do in the Current U.S. Composition Classroom? Duka Vladimira -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 45 The Discourse of Promotional Tourist Literature in Montenegro Marina Rmuš Rmuš ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 59 Washback of State Matura Examination on English Learning in Perception of Albanian Students of High Schools Jaup Zenuni ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 77 The Relevance of Discourse Connectives in English and French Electrical Engineering Discourse Miloš D. Đurić , Marija Panić Panić --------------------------------------------------------------- 95 Anksioznost u tekstu Emir Muhić, Dalibor Kesić -----------------------------------------------------------------Kesić ------------------------------------------------------------------ 109 Dijalekatske odlike proznog diskursa Stefana Mitrova Ljubiše Miodarka Tepavčević ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 125 Sintaksa i semantika glagola u konstrukcijama s adverbijalnim dopunama dopunama Sonja Nenezić Nenezić -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 145 Broj atributivnih imenica kao faktor promjene značenja u imeničkoj frazi Maja Žarković --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Žarković --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 153
Aorist u srpskom i francuskom jeziku (sintaksička (sintaksička analiza upotrebe ovog vremena u romanu Jedan romanu Jedan život život G. de Mopasana i njegovog prevodnog ekvivalenta na srpskom jeziku) Marija Glišić, Milica Milašinović ---------------------------------------------------------Milašinović ---------------------------------------------------------- 161 Mikrotoponimija Mikrotoponimija Barjamovice, Markovine i Velestova Novica Vujović -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Vujović -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 175 Studije književnosti i kulture / Literary and Cultural Studies What Makes Pierre Fréha’s French Sahib a Novel of Globalization?: Reflections of a Translator Shonu Nangia --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 189 (Dis)obeying the “Inexorable Censor”: Catholicism in the Fiction of Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien Vesna Ukić Košta ----------------------------------------------------------------------------Košta ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 199 Šepard i popularna kultura Svjetlana R. Ognjenović--------------Ognjenović----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 213 Rekonstrukcja Rekonstrukcja mitu króla Nikoli I Petrovicia w dramacie historycznym Radmiły Vojvodić Princeza Ksenija od Crne Gore Katarzyna Sudnik ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 223 Filmske figure u dokumentarnom filmu Ždrijelo filmu Ždrijelo Živka Nikolića Zoran Koprivica ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 237 Različiti stručni prilozi /Miscellaneous /Miscellaneous PRIKAZI / BOOK REVIEWS Bil jana jana Dojčinović, Dojčinović, Susreti u tami. Uvod u čitanje Virdžinije Virdžinije Vulf. Vulf. Službeni Glasnik, Beograd, 2011. Nina Sirković ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sirković ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 255 The Current Status of the Trio of Virtues: Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-first century . By Howard Gardner (New York: Basic books. A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2011) Slađana Živković, Nadežda Stojković --------------------------------------------------- 261
PREVODI / TRANSLATIONS Iz Linda Hutcheon, Teorija adaptacije -------------------------------------------------- 267 Frederik Džejmson, Protivurječnosti Protivurječnosti debate realizam – modernizam modern izam ------------------ - 283 UPUTSTVO AUTORIMA --------------------------------------------------------------------- 293 INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS ---------------------------------------------------- 295
Nauka o jeziku / Language Studies
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UDK: 81'271
CONVENTIONALITY IN ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS AND RELEVANCE THEORY Bledar Toska University o f Vlora “Ismail Qemali”
Abstract: Conventions in language are generally considered to be socially and
linguistically accepted standards or norms which have been used over time as a practice to facilitate social and linguistic interaction between members of a speech community. They are socially constructed and reproduced by individuals of a speech community and relative to linguistic context as well as time and place. Some instances of these standards may include orthographic, phonological, morphological systems, sentence meaning or its interpretation. Firstly, this paper briefly discusses conventionality issues in fulfilling illocutionary acts through certain conditions and rules according to the Speech Act Theory which Austin (1975) and Searle (1969) developed. Performing an illocutionary act of promising or requesting, for instance, involves following and recognizing four major rules, namely, the essential, sincerity, preparatory and propositional rules, which are offered as instructions to speakers in order to enable successful communication. Secondly, this article talks about Relevance Theory (Wilson & Sperber 2004) and two principles of relevance: a Cognitive Principle (that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance), and a Communicative Principle (that every utterance creates expectations of optimal relevance). This relevance-theoretic approach outlines a description of what happens when speakers produce and interpret speech and dismisses conventionality aspects of it. Relevance theory has been adopted in this paper to explain that illocutionary acts and their communicative force could well be affected by cognitive effects and not simply (or only) by linguistic conventionality. Key Words: conventionality, Speech Act Theory, illocutionary acts, Relevance Theory.
A short theoretical discussion It is not my intention to speak at length about the notion of conventionality in this paper. However, I would like to make a few brief and general remarks about this concept. Conventions are present in most of our daily activities and appear to affect and guide our behaviour in many social aspects of our lives. Their importance lies in the fact that they as “a species of norms” are regarded as “rules that regulate human conduct” (Marmor x). For instance, we are inclined to greet each other when we meet, to follow certain
10 Journal of Language and Literary Studies
rules and procedures at work, to please ourselves with a drink in our free time or to end our day by going to bed. Conventions as well as the notion of conventionality apply also to language, in much the way as they do to our social life. This can be a very interesting area of study for linguists, for, as Marmor states in the preface of his work (xii), language is central and conventional aspects (and non-conventional ones) of language provide a useful insight into its nature and study. Although linguistic conventions are sometimes issues of controversial discussions, there is hardly any doubt that a few aspects of language are conventional, as for instance the sound-sense relations of words such as tree or house or the basic syntactic sentence structure (Subject + Object). One of the pragmatic theories of language use which embraces the notion of conventionality in communication is the Speech Act Theory (SAT), developed and elaborated by J. L. Austin almost half a century ago as a reaction to the claim about the descriptive nature of language. He claimed that the use of language goes far beyond the language users’ purpose to describe or report something. In using language people perform certain linguistic acts be cause “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action” (Austin 5). Kearns states that “a linguistic act, or speech act, is an intentional, meaningful act performed with an expression or expressions” (50). Thus, language use is regarded as an intentional act expressed through speech (Searle 16), just as an ordinary everyday act is performed through the appropriate means, such as the act of greeting someone by waving at him or her. This analogy suggests that people linguistically communicate by performing certain speech acts under certain conditions and with particular intentions. For instance, sentence (1) is intended to perform the act of promising to show someone the most amazing thing (s)he has ever seen. (1) I promise you that I can show you the most amazing thing you have ever seen. (2012 FIC Analog) Speech acts could be better explored if we distinguish their three basic types, “the locutionary act (and within it the phonetic, the phatic, and the rhetic acts) which has a meaning; the illocutionary act which has a certain force in saying something; the perlocutionary act which is the achieving of certain effects by saying something” (Austin 121). As the title of this paper suggests, I will focus only on illocutionary acts and deal with a few of their characteristics in the provided examples below. Moreover, Searle provides a list of conditions (called felicity conditions) which should be satisfied for the successful performance of a particular illocutionary act (or the act of promising, as an appropriate explanatory example). The first condition is the propositional content condition (in
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expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S), the second is the preparatory condition (S believes that doing A would be in H’s best interest and that S can do A), the third is the sincerity condition (S intends to do A) and the fourth is the essential condition (S undertakes the obligation to perform A). Based on these conditions, rules, which serve to indicate the appropriate illocutionary force, are formulated as follows: proposition content rule, preparatory rule, sincerity rule and essential rule (for details, see Searle 54-65). Searle maintains that illocutionary acts are generally made possible and performed by these rules. After all, for Searle, “speaking a language is engaging in a rule-governed form of behaviour” (16). This short discussion raises the question of the presence of conventional aspects (or certain rules) in performing illocutionary acts, a claim vehemently defended by Austin and Searle, but which remains even today a controversial issue among linguists and language philosophers. Austin himself warns that “we must notice that the illocutionary act is a conventional act: in act done as conforming to a convention” (105) and Searle asserts that the illocutionary effect that the speaker intends to produce is achieved by “getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect […] in virtue of the fact that the meaning of the item he utters conventionally associates it with producing that effect” (60-61). Presumably, Searle refers here to the perlocutionary act, although I am not quite certain. But if this is the case, then we should consider Austin’s claim that “perlocutionary acts are not conventional, though conventional acts may be made use of in order to bring off the perlocutionary act” (122), which testifies to certain unclear outlines in the SAT itself. The issue of conventionality in SAT and illocutionary acts has been criticized in many works, which either partially or totally reject the assertion that “most nontechnical concepts in ordinary language lack absolutely strict rules” (Searle 55) and the need for these rules in communication which Searle highlights. For instance, Strawson states that “there are many cases in which it is not as conforming to an accepted convention of any kind … that an illocutionary act is performed” (153) but as recognizing the speaker’s intention. Similarly, Stampe argues against Austin –Searle conventionalism in illocutionary acts on the grounds that it is not by virtue of rules that promises are promises, but because of the “speaker's intending an utterance as a promise, reminder, suggestion, or request that makes it one; whether it will be so understood depends on the addressee's ability to infer that it was so intended” (qtd. in Green 113). While Marmor (106-130) takes somehow a more moderate position on these views, by claiming that only certain institutional or conventional illocutionary acts are based on fixed conventions (for instance, Guilty!, The meeting is adjourned., Hi! or Thanks!), but who, nevertheless, excludes the overgeneralization to attribute conventional aspects to illocutionary acts, as pretended in SAT.
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In simple terms, it appears that illocutionary acts (as well as their force) are not totally decontextualized, in which case their production and interpretation would rely on conventional (meta)linguistic rules, but are frequently contextualized acts, whose fulfillment highly depends on the speaker’s intention s and hearer’s inferential ability to utter and understand utterances. Relevance Theory (RT) (Wilson and Sperber) takes a somehow different perspective on utterance interpretation and it is based on this cognitive and psychological theory and on two principles of relevance: a Cognitive Principle (that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance), and a Communicative Principle (that every utterance creates expectations of optimal relevance). According to RT, utterance interpretation is a psychological phenomenon affected by cognitive factors in addition to social and linguistic ones. Every utterance could be interpreted in various ways, but not all of them are equally accessible to the hearer, who is equipped with a general criterion for evaluating them and accepting only the most relevant and eliminating alternative ones. All utterances occur in a certain determined context, which consists of mentally represented assumptions that help the hearer process the new received input. During the interaction between context and the new input the hearer’s mind is involved in a processing effort to evaluate the utterance and to recover cognitive effects, namely to strengthen a contextual assumption, to eliminate another one or others and to con struct a contextual implication, “a conclusion deducible from input and context together, but from neither input nor context alone” (Wilson and Sperber 608). Thus, the cognitive principle of relevance is that “human cognition tends to be geared to the maxi misation of relevance” (610) when interpreting utterances and completely rejects the notion of conventionality in this respect. Not only the cognitive principle but also the communicative one excludes conventional aspects of language use. Wilson and Sperber assert that the cognitive system is relevance-oriented, which “makes it possible to predict and manipulate the mental states of others” (610). In this regard, it is likely for the communicator to predict which contextual assumptions others retrieve, based on the ostensive-inferential communication process, in which the speaker transmits his or her intentions and the hearer constructs contextual implications. The minimal unit of communication, the utterance, creates presumptions or expectations of relevance which are expected to be worth processing and to assist the hearer to identify the speaker’s meaning. Moreover, optimal relevance is needed at this stage since the utterance should produce sufficient cognitive effects and with a low level of processing efforts. Thus, optimal relevance presumes that (612) a) the ostensive stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the audience’s processing effort and b) it is the most relevant one compatible with communicator’s abilities and preferences.
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This was a brief account of the RT, its principles and the way language is processed in communication. Obviously, it appears to be a much promising model relying on the abilities of the human cognition system and its evolution over time. RT concisely describes in plausible terms how communication is enabled, produced and interpreted, and takes a different view from other pragmatic theories, such as Grice’s Co-operative Principle or Austin and Searle’s STA, by rejecting conventional aspects of communication, much supported in them.
Comparative Analyses In this second part of the article I will attempt to compare the way SAT and RT interpret aspects of communication between the speaker and the hearer in promises, requests, assertions, questions, thanks, advice, warnings, greetings and congratulations, all of which have been listed in Searle’s discussion of illocutionary acts (71-72). General comparisons between SAT and RT prove to be very difficult for two main reasons concerned in this paper. Dominicy and Franken (263) claim that illocutionary acts do not exist in RT and that in SAT speakers “are assumed to be cooperative … while in RT, speakers are assumed to aim at being optimally relevant”. In example (2) below S predicates a future A of himself or herself, namely that S will offer special blessings to H on the basis of his or her ability to perform A and because of A being in the best interest of H. Furthermore, S intends to do act A and explicitly undertakes the obligation to perform act A. Based on these conditions, the utterance in example (2) is classified as an illocutionary act, and because some rules apply (propositional content, preparatory, sincerity and essential ones) it is believed to be a conventional act. (2) I can also promise you that if it is Heavenly Father's will, you will receive special blessings, and that I will do all I'm allowed to do to support you from the other side. (2011 SPOK ABC 20_20) Such a framework supported by SAT would suffice to assist the speaker to produce the utterance and convey his or her intentions (and the promise) and the hearer to decode the speaker’s meaning. However there are a couple of drawbacks in this conventional way of communication. According to RT, the utterance is expected to create expectations of relevance only if it is worth being processing. That is, it is to be interpreted as a promise only if it produces optimal relevance – to produce cognitive effects which will create the appropriate contextual implications. Example (3) is an utterance that is intended to be a request. S predicates a future act A (to bring some detection equipment) of H, who is
F OLI A L I NGUI NGUI STI CA ET L I TTER TT ERAR ARII A : A SOPII S ZA NA UKU O JEZI KU I Č ASOP
KNJIŽEVNOSTI KNJIŽEVNOSTI (7)
Institut za jezik i književnost Filozofski fakultet, Nikšić Univerzitet Crne Gore