#7: Speech Acts

Assignment 7- Speech Acts

In Nastri’s article on speech acts, he “examined how people use language to construct their away messages in an effort to accomplish the goal of providing awareness” as well as how the use of language conventions affect away messages. In particular, Nastri used Searle’s five speech acts model—assertive, directive, commisive, expressive, and declarative—to analyze away messages.

The following are five away messages taken randomly from my AIM buddylist; I coded them in the way that Nastri did.

A: I'm studying! be proud.

This can be broken down into two separate speech acts—“I’m studying!” and “be proud”—the first part of which is an assertive while the second part is, quite surprisingly, a directive. The first part informs the audience (i.e. causes the audience to be aware) of what this person is up to. In the second portion, the person who wrote this message is telling, or directing, the receiver to be proud of her that she is studying.

No language conventions are used.

B: GRAB

It is unclear what is intended by this away message. If taken as the capitalized version of the word “grab”, this would take on the literal meaning of “grab” and expressed in a way that probably mean “grab firmly” (due to the capitalization). In this case, the author of the away message might command his audience to grab firmly onto something…though that doesn’t make much sense. So the audience is forced to come up with an alternative. Perhaps this is an acryonym for something. What’s the acryonym? One suggestion might be that only those close to the author would know. Thus, he is using common ground shared between his close friends to relay a message that others wouldn’t understand.

C: brushing teeth

Assertive. No conventions used.

D: Head's not in good shape. I'll have to readjust it later on.

This away message can be, again, broken down into two parts. The first part is an assertive—the author is informing the receiver of the condition of his head. The second part is a commissive. By saying “I’ll have to readjust it later on”, the author is commiting himself to “readjusting” his head “later on”, whatever that might entail. No language conventions are used.

E: around

Assertive.

Nastri made three hypotheses: 1.) Away messages are mainly assertive, commissive, and expressive speech acts. 2.) The more involved IM users are in group activities, the more likely they will use common ground based conventions in their IM away messages. And 3.) Greater experience with IM should correlate with increased use of CMC conventions in away messages. While hypothesis 1 is proven, hypothesis 2 and 3 are invalid. For hypothesis 2, there was no correlation between the number of group activities that the user is involved in and the likeliness they will use common ground based conventions in their away messages. For hypothesis 3, a negative correlation was found between the experience a user has with IM and his/her frequency of using CMC conventions in away messages.

I agree with Nastri in that I also think the purpose of away messages is to inform others of your whereabouts or of the current happenings, or any other relevant information that would indicate the germaneness of the away message. As a result, it is only logical that assertive speech acts would make up the majority of away messages, followed by commissives and directives. Of course, there is no guarantee that all away messages will be like this, as, often, the information found in away messages are actually uninformative and barely reveal any information at all about the author.