A Study Of Direct And Indirect Speech Acts In Anita Desai's Novel "Clear Light If Day

Abstract:- Speech Act theory is about the language use. It investigates the linguistic knowledge of language users as well as their knowledge of the world. As J. Lyons stated ‘it is a theory of saying as doing within the framework of social institutions and conventions’. So language is deployed to do things rather than stating. J.L.Austin was the originator of theory called “Speech act”. He has delivered lectures at Harvard university in 1955 which were collected by William James and he has published posthumously those notes under the title “How To Do Things With Words” (1962). Austin stated the concept of ‘saying something is to do something’ and finally came up with the idea that in producing an utterance a speaker performs three acts simultaneously- a Locutionary, an Illocutionary and a Perlocutionary act. Later Searle reassessed the speech act theory and suggested five classes of speech acts- Assertive means truth value and state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. Expressive expresses about the feeling of the speaker. Directives are efforts to get the hearer to do something. Commissives are speech acts that yield the speaker to some future course of action. Declaratives are the speech acts that alter the world via their utterances. Communication is basically highly purposeful activity. Speaker wants to express more than what is stated in an utterance. So this indirectness takes towards a distinct relationship between structural forms and communication functions of an utterance. When there is direct relationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act, but an indirect speech act accomplishes more than one function simultaneously. So indirect speech act is actually a way of studying how more gets communicated than actually said