CHAPTER ONE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1.0 Introduction

Human beings and language cannot be separated from each other in society. Created as social beings, people need a language to communicate and to build a relationship with each other in social interaction. In this interaction, language becomes the primary means of communication. By using language, they reveal their ideas, express their happiness and sadness, make a joke with others, give information, command someone to do something, influence someone and etc.

According to Taylor and Taylor (1990:5), a language is a system of signs used to convey messages. By uttering language, either spoken or written, people deliver their thought from one person to another. Hence, language becomes an important thing in daily communication, as a medium of transferring and receiving meaning. In other words, language becomes a means of communication since it is needed to create a good relationship with others. Therefore, if people want to avoid misinterpretation, they should know the meaning of the utterance that they use in verbal interaction.

In delivering their purposes, people use spoken language. By using spoken language, people can communicate efficiently. They can directly deliver their intention to others. Although people use spoken language to communicate efficiently, their utterances usually have a wider range of meaning than its simply a literal meaning. This is mostly influenced by the context when the speech occurred. In some cases, it is very important to understand the relation between the meaning of one sentence and another, since it may cause misunderstanding.

1.2 Background to the Study

Language plays a significant role within society which functions as a means of communication. Most of people affairs are said to be done via language. With the existence of language, people are able to exchange information, express their ideas, thoughts, opinions, feelings and so on. In using language, however, people do not merely make a set of grammatically correct sentences.

It is widely observed that sometimes people do not solely say what they mean; the utterances they perform are different from the meanings they seek. In other words, there are always motivations, intentions or purpose behind ones’ utterances. This phenomenon in language are generally called speech acts; actions performed via language (Yule, 1996).

Speech acts as the basic unit of language are central to effective communication since they allow people to perform a wide range of functions such as apologizing, thanking, commanding, requesting, and the like. Such phenomenon of speech acts happens everywhere, not to mention in the classroom setting. It is evident that the teaching and learning process involves a lot of interactions where teacher and students produce a number of utterances especially during language class.

This particular language used in classroom setting is widely known as classroom speech acts. The use of speech acts determines how the teaching and learning process will happen. Cullen (1998) in Celce-Murcia (2000) emphasizes that the language used by the teacher (speech acts) is particularly important since it will support and enhance learning. The use of appropriate speech acts will lead to successful teaching and learning process and vice versa.

However, sometimes it is difficult to understand what the teacher says in the acts; thus, it often causes misunderstanding in interpreting the messages. This case occurs mostly with students with the status as foreign language learners. They tend to get difficulty since the production of speech acts are varied in the forms and functions.

The understanding of the utterances also depends crucially on the actual contexts and the pragmatic knowledge, especially speech acts. For example, the expression “The mid-term test will begin on the second of December” can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, in terms of locutionary act, the utterance is simply regarded as informing in which the teacher gives the information to the students about the mid-term test. Secondly, in terms of illocutionary act and its force, the utterance can be classified into directive act with the force of warning. By producing the utterance, the teacher tries to warn the students to study for the mid-term test.

As mentioned earlier, speech acts are vitally important to the teaching and learning process. It is justified since the acts of transmitting knowledge, organizing activities, controlling classroom, and giving instructions are done through teacher talks that contain the speech acts. Having sufficient knowledge of pragmatics especially speech acts is also of great importance in order to minimize misunderstanding during the teaching and learning process.

This is also supported by the fact that in today’s language teaching, students are not only demanded to possess grammatical competence but also pragmatic competence. Communication barrier will not happen if both teachers and students possess good pragmatic competence. Thus, it can be said that the failure or success of teaching and learning is greatly determined by the appropriate use of speech acts.

The theoretical background of this study focuses on Austin’s Speech Act Theory and other communication theories

Half a century ago, John Austin gave a series of lectures, the William James Lectures at Harvard, which were published posthumously as a book entitled How to Do Things with Words. Austin presented a new picture of analysing meaning; meaning is described in a relation among linguistic conventions correlated with words/sentences, the situation where the speaker actually says something to the hearer, and associated intentions of the speaker.

The idea that meaning exists among these relations is depicted successfully by the concept of acts: in uttering a sentence, that is, in utilizing linguistic conventions, the speaker with an associated intention performs a linguistic act to the hearer. Austin’s analysis of meaning is unique in the sense that meaning is not explained through some forms of reduction. In reductive theories of meaning, complexities of meaning expressed by a sentence are reduced by a single criterion to something else, and this is claimed to be the process of explaining the meaning of the sentence.

According to Warnock (1969), by verification principles logical positivists reduced complexities of sentence meaning to something verifiable, and condemned an unverifiable sentence as, strictly speaking, nonsense. Tarski also took a reductive approach and defined the meaning of a sentence in terms of a state of affairs to which the sentence corresponds.

Modern truth-conditional semanticists adopt the Russellian idea of explaining the meaning of a sentence and the Russellian/Tarskian idea of correlating a sentence, as its meaning, with a fact or state of affairs. Dowty, Wall, and Peters (1985) say, to explain the meaning of a sentence is «to specify its truth conditions, that is., to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of that sentence». Austin, on the other hand, tried to describe «the total speech act in the total speech situation» and warned against oversimplifying complexities of meaning, in particular, by reducing meaning to descriptive meaning:

It has come to be seen that many specially perplexing words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve to indicate some specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to indicate (not to report) the circumstances in which the statement is made or reservations to which it is subject or the way in which it is to be taken and the like. To overlook these possibilities in the way once common is called the «descriptive» fallacy. (Austin 1962: 3)

By the concept of speech acts and the felicity conditions for performing them, Austin showed that to utter a performative sentence is to be evaluated in terms of, what we might call, conventionality, actuality, and intentionality of uttering the sentence. Uttering a performative sentence is to be described in terms of (I) associated conventions which are valid (without which the purported act is disallowed; a violation of the felicity conditions (A)), (II) the speaker’s actual, accurate utterance of the sentence to the hearer, which induces an associated response from the hearer (without which the purported act is vitiated; a violation of the felicity conditions (B)), and (III) an associated intention of the speaker (without which the purported act is abused; a violation of the felicity conditions (Γ)).

Through a description of the success/failure of the speech act purported, which is explained as a violation/observation of the felicity conditions, Austin formulated a method to describe a sentence in terms of the speech situation where it is uttered: by means of associated linguistic conventions, the speaker, with an associated intention, actually performs an act to the hearer, which induces a certain response from the hearer.

As we will develop later, Austin’s idea can be interpreted in the following way: by uttering a performative sentence, the speaker indicates a certain speech situation where (I) a certain convention exists, as shown by the felicity condition (A.1), (II) there are certain persons and circumstances, as shown by the felicity condition (A.2), (III) the speaker performs the act in a certain way, as shown by the felicity condition (B.1), (IV) the hearer reacts to it in a certain way, as shown by the felicity condition (B.2), (V) the speaker has certain thoughts, feelings, or intentions, as shown by the felicity condition (Γ.1), and (VI) the speaker is supposed to execute a certain task in the future, as shown by the felicity condition (Γ.2).

In this frame work, the success of the purported speech act is explained as an identification of the present speech situation with the speech situation indicated by the performative sentence. Austin then delineates the concept of performativity. He shows that performativity does not conflict with statements as the initial distinction between performatives and constatives suggests. In its extended sense, performativity is interpreted as a quintessential feature of communication which is expressed with numerous verbs.

So even uttering a sentence of «I state …» can be infelicitous in six different ways in the same manner as uttering a sentence with a performative verb. In the latter part of the William James Lectures, Austin specifies performativity, formerly introduced as an intuitive idea of «performing an act». He introduces the concept of illocutionary acts, and carefully distinguishes them from locutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. Locutionary acts include phonetic acts, phatic acts, and rhetic acts.

Phonetic acts are acts of pronouncing sounds, phatic acts are acts of uttering words or sentences in accordance with the phonological and syntactic rules of the language to which they belong, and rhetic acts are acts of uttering a sentence with sense and more or less definite reference.

Meaning is explained by an examination of linguistic conventions (contained in a language), actual performance (language use), and associated intentions. In linguistics the general tendency is to describe one aspect of meaning as if it were the essence of meaning. In semantics, linguistic conventions are generally explained by correlating sentences with states of affairs.

In pragmatics, actual performances are studied to describe a certain type or aspect of communication. Intentionality is described, semantically, in terms of the relation between sentences and associated intentions. Or it is described, pragmatically, as actual performances in which the speaker expresses his intentions. As a result, semantics theories tend to offer the linguistic means that are available to the users without explaining how those meanings are used to make communication possible. Whereas pragmatic theories tend to explain what is happening in communication without explaining the available linguistic meanings. Austin’s theory is promising because it unites all three aspects of meaning, namely linguistic conventions, language use, and intentionality. In this sense, it is a credible general theory of communication. Another uniqueness of Austin’s theory lies in the fact that meaning is explained in a non-tautological way.

Austin’s speech act theory, however, theoretically distinguishes the language, the present speech situation, and the intentions of the present speaker. As Austin’s felicity conditions in (A) show, a purported speech act can be infelicitous because of the language, i.e. linguistic conventions, irrespective of actual performances in the speech situation and the intention of the present speaker. As the felicity conditions in (B) show, an actual performance can be infelicitous in its own way irrespective of the linguistic conventions and the present speaker’s intention.

And, finally, as the felicity conditions in (Γ) show, a speech act can be abused irrespective of the linguistic conventions and the performance of the present speaker. So to describe linguistic conventions, to describe an actual performance in the speech situation, and to describe the speaker’s intention expressed are theoretically independent of one another. For this reason, the success of the speech act is explained as the coincidence of these three distinctive elements: a purported act becomes the act performed, which is substantiated by an associated intention expressed.

We have proposed to explain performing an illocutionary act as follows: in uttering a sentence, the speaker indicates, as the present speech situation, a certain speech situation (specified by linguistic conventions), which is substantiated by an associated intention of the present speaker. When there is no gap among these, i.e. the present speech situation, a speech situation indicated, and the intentions of the speaker expressed, the purported act is successful: the present speech situation becomes an indicated speech situation, with the intention expressed. According to this theory, the language, that is linguistic conventions, expresses things outside of the system of the language.

Aging Phenomenological Theory also forms the bases for this study: Phenomenological theorists emphasize that each person actively constructs her or his own world. According to the Phenomenological approach to personality, the specific ways each person perceives and interprets the world make up personality and guide one’s behaviour. People’s view of reality/perspective is important in guiding their behaviour and is shaped by learned expectations.

These expectations form personal constructs which are generalized ways of anticipating the world. Carl Roger’s Self Theory emphasized self-actualization which he described as the innate tendency toward growth that motivates all human behaviour. Rogers distinguished between the actual self and the ideal self. Problems develop when the two self-concepts do not match or when one’s expectations or ideals don’t match reality.

Cybernetic Theory is another communication theory to guide this study

In 1948, Norbert Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” to elaborate on the existing theory of the transmission of messages by incorporating his idea that people send messages within a system in an effort to control their surrounding environment (Wiener, 1954). The basic function of communication, which Wiener defines in his theory as the processing of information, is to control the environment in which one lives.

This idea suggests that the goal of human communication is to become familiarized with a certain environment while simultaneously influencing aspects of it. With this, Wiener asserts that, ‘the purpose of Cybernetics to develop a language and techniques that enable us to attack the problem of control and communication in general and find the proper repertory of ideas and techniques to classify their particular manifestations under certain concepts’ (Wiener, 1954, p.16). Considering the views described above, the present study is interested in identifying the types of speech acts performed by the English teacher and students of level 400 and how this affects their meaning making

1.3 Aim

The present study focuses on the speech act and meaning making in the spoken communication of level 400 students in the University of Buea. It is aimed that this study will identify the various speech acts used in the class room, examine the functions of the speech acts and how this affects the meaning making in the classroom.

1.4 Statement of the Problem

Communication that happens in society mostly uses language as its primary means. A language consists of grammatical and structural words that can be used to draw meaning of what people utter in communication. In the case of University of Buea, English language is the language of instruction.

Effective use of communication between the students and teachers has a big role in the ability of the students to make meaning of what the teacher is saying, one of such ways to make meaning in communication is through understanding and making use of speech acts strategies in the classroom. However, they turn to be misuse of speech acts in the classroom interaction between the teachers and students in the University of Buea most especially from other departments other than English.

As a result, students are forced to result to misinterpretations and lose of meaning from utterances of the teacher. If the learners can easily understand and identify the different speech act which are divided into declarations, representatives, expressive, directives, and commisisves, meaning making will be facilitated and thus facilitate  learning. It is against this backdrop that this study seeks to investigate the use of speech act on the meaning making in communication by level 400 students of the University of Buea in which findings and recommendation may help to improve on the situation under study.

1.5 Research Questions

1.5.1 General Research Question

To what extent do speech act affects meaning making in the spoken communication of level 400 students in the University of Buea?

1.5.2 Specific Research Questions

1. What is the different classroom speech acts used in classrooms at the University of Buea?
2. How do the different types of classroom speech acts affect meaning-making in the classroom?
3. To what extent does the function of the speech acts shape the meaning-making process of level 400 students?

Read More: English Language Project Topics with Materials