<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="J80-3002">
  <Title>Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts 1</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2. Previous Approaches
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Two approaches to the characterization of indirect speech acts have been particularly influential for both computational and traditional linguists: the views proposed by Gordon and Lakoff and by Searle. Since the rules presented in this paper combine properties of each approach, we start with a brief description of each.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We consider first the approach taken by Gordon and Lakoff \[12\]. Concentrating primarily on request, Gordon and Lakoff propose a set of what they call sincerity conditions and then give a single powerful rule to account for the different ways that a request can be framed. They say that to make a sincere request a speaker must, first, want the action done, second, believe that the hearer can do the action, third, believe that the hearer wants to do the action, and, fourth, believe that the hearer would not do the action unless asked to. The first of these sincerity conditions is called speaker-based and the remaining three are called hearer-based. The rule given is: One can convey a request by (a) asserting a speaker-based sincerity condition or (b) questioning a hearer-based sincerity condition.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This formulation is attractive because it is so elegant and simple, but it is also, as the authors are the first to observe, only a preliminary answer. The conditions associated with request are incomplete, since they lack any mention of obligation relationships; these are discussed below in Section 3.3. More problematic is the lack of detailed guidelines for extending the theory beyond requests.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A second major approach to ISA regularities is that of Searle. Searle presents a more complete account of ISAs, proposing generalizations associated with the five major classes of speech act defined in \[26\]. In \[25\] he lists four generalizations for directives and five others for commissives. The generalizations are differentiated according to the parts of the speech act identified in \[24\], i.e. propositional content conditions, sincerity conditions, and preparatory conditions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (Gordon and Lakoff's sincerity conditions, in contrast, seem to be an amalgam of Searle's sincerity and preparatory conditions.) Searle's contribution is a valuable one, in that he has succeeded in accounting for a broad range of speech acts. At the same time, Searle's generalizations can be questioned on the count that they are too specific. Generalizations are stated in terms of types of preparatory conditions, rather than in terms of preparatory conditions as a whole. A more serious problem is the relegation of the notion of speaker- and hearer-based conditions to an informal role, as opposed to giving it an explicit place in the theory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The theory proposed in this paper is both a synthesis and a generalization of the two approaches. Rather than derive ISA forms from a single set of conditions associated with the speech act, as do Gordon aild Lakoff, I follow Searle in looking for important classes of ISA forms based on different parts of the speech act.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The theory presented goes a step further, however, looking beyond the structure of individual speech acts to derive ISA forms from very general principles of goal formation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>