Indirect Speech Acts via Conversational Implicatures and Pragmatic Presuppositions

Abstract

This paper investigates the correlations between conversational implicature, pragmatic presupposition and indirect act illocution as relying on the acts’ «idiomacity vs. inferentiality» and “transposition vs. non-transposition”. I will argue that the meaning of conversational implicatures and indirect acts’ illocution relies on situational presuppositions while interpersonal presuppositions determine the choice of directness or indirectness and their coding in accordance with conventional-communicative presuppositions. In addition to the primary and literary illocution, the article introduces the notion of additional illocution that extends the indirect act’s meaning without changing its illocutionary type. Correspondingly, the primary illocution, which changes the act’s illocutionary type, is viewed as the constituent of transposed acts while additional illocution is appropriate for non-transposed acts. Inferential indirect acts involve two types of relations between illocutions and conversational implicatures,which depends on the acts’ transposition vs. non-transposition criteria. In transposed acts, the primary illocution mostly relies on conversational implicature while additional illocution of non-transposed acts relates to implicature through the latter content contribution to speech act’s felicity conditions.