Speech Acts

The seminar today is the first actual lesson to be conducted for this module on cross-cultural communication and discourse. After today's seminar, I feel that I have gained a greater insight and understanding into the concept of a speech act and how a speech act is being used in various cultures. There are many forms of speech act, like for example promise, threaten, invite, praise, criticize and even apologize. In my daily life, I hardly notice that simple things like making a promise or presenting a request are also classified under speech acts. Moreover, these speech acts varies to a large extent when people of different culture and background use them.

Speech acts can vary in many ways and one of the ways is sociopragmatic variation. I feel that other than the demographic factors like age, occupation, religion & race, a person's family upbringing and circle of friends play a significant role in affecting the way you perform your speech acts. For example, if you are brought up by parents who constantly use a lot of vulgarity when conversing with one another, chances are that the manner in which you make a request will not be very courteous. Other than that, the peers which you mix with also influences the way you use your words. If you have friends who are rather blunt and always make comments on one another openly, subconsciously you may also tend to be less tactful when making criticisms of others.

As we discussed about compliments in our class, Dr Deng asked one of our classmates "What was the last compliment that you gave?" It also got me thinking about that question. To my surprise, I actually cannot recall when was the last time I gave a compliment to someone else. I attribute that to two possible reasons, either I have been really stingy with my compliments, or that I have a really poor memory such that I forgot when was the last time I gave a compliment. Through this, it may also illustrate the disadvantages of data collection by recall protocols, because we are humans and do not always remember details of our speech that accurately.

Through the discourse completion task(DCT) in the form of the questionnaire we did, the results showed that 43% of our compliment responses are accepting and only 16% of them are rejecting. These results may not be thoroughly accurate, because the written responses are mainly written with our espoused theory in mind. It reflects what we believe we will respond under the certain situation or conversation given in the questionnaire. However, in real-life, the actual manner in which we respond are based more on our theory-in-use, referring to the real-time practical actions n words we use. This link provides more information on espoused theory and theory-in-use. Like in the questionnaire we did, I may think I will take compliments well and accept most of them, but in real life it may not be that case.

All in all, this seminar has made me more aware of the various speech acts that can be performed, and how various factors affect the way in which we perform the speech act. From today onwards, I think I might just be that little bit more observant when friends around me make a compliment, apologize or even threaten others.