Modeling figuration in speech acts

Abstract The main thrust of the contribution of this study is to demonstrate not only the ubiquity and pervasiveness of conceptual metonymy and metaphor in producing and understanding illocutionary acts, i.e., speech acts, but also to account for this observation by explicating the roles of various folk models such as Action, Talk, and Embodiment. The paper maintains that folk models (i.e., cultural models/cognitive schemas intersubjectively shared by a social group) impact grammatical structures and usages and, in themselves, constitute a basis for associative and analogical reasoning, i.e., they give rise to conceptual metonymies and metaphors. The first part of the paper accounts for indirect speech act data with reference to scenarios constructed for three types of illocutionary acts: directives, commissives, and expressives. After providing cultural and linguistic evidence of the psychological validity of the folk model of Action (vs. Talk), an Action Scenario is developed, which forms the basis of the speech act models. The conceptual structure proposed for Illocutionary Scenarios consists of components termed the Before, Core, Result, and After. All indirect speech acts, we maintain, come about by means of constructing utterances that instantiate (or refer to) non-Core components of the model, which are exploited metonymically to index a target (Core) meaning. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the Core component of commissives, declarations, and expressives as manifested in utterances expressing bodily movements and acts of transfer and possession. Such “explicit embodied performatives” rely on a folk model of communication called the Transfer Model of Communication. Interestingly, embodied performatives are indeed figurative; however, they are not felt to be indirect. The paper concludes with questions for future research: (i) What kind of pragmatic constraints operate on the deployment of indirect speech acts? and (ii) Which speech act types are realizable via explicit embodied performatives?