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Responses to indirect speech acts in a chat room

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2004

ELIZABETH SCHEYDER
ELIZABETH SCHEYDER
Affiliation:
PhD candidate in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She also works at Penn as the Senior Distributed Learning Specialist in the School of Arts and Sciences
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Abstract

THIS STUDY compares responses to indirect speech acts in a chat room with responses in a telephone conversation. In this instance, the chat room serves as a meeting place for members of a recent undergraduate university course and the telephone conversations are taken from a study done by Clark in 1979. Indirect speech acts are those that have a literal meaning (e.g., ‘Do you have a dollar?’ – the surface question is a request for information) as well as an indirect meaning (in this case, a request for money). Responses can consist of (1) just the answer to the surface question, (2) that answer plus the information indirectly requested, (3) only the information indirectly requested, or (4) some other form of response. The percentage of each type of response was compared in the two forms of communication. Clark found that the majority of responses consisted of only the information requested, and as predicted, the typed environment of the chat room yielded an even greater majority of this simplified form of response.

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 54 - 60
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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