The article deals with the meaning and mutual relations of the terms speech act, speech action (Sprachhandlung) and communicative function of an utterance. The authoress' goal is to determine whether they can be considered synonymous. While the term speech act is synonymous with 'illocutionary act', the conceptual meaning of the other two terms differs. Though it is difficult to draw a sharp line between a speech act and a speech action/behavior, time span and demarcation (boundaries) are differentiating criteria. The most important distinguishing criterion is the concept of language (speech) behavior, which can be viewed not as a singular event (act), but rather as a complex event consisting of mutually mixed acts or as a continuum (sequence) of sub-acts resulting in one macro-act. A speech act is a static unit, received and comprehended as a result of dynamic speech action (activity), seen as a process without sharp boundaries. A speech act can be a constituent of a speech action, but not vice-versa. Any given language utterance operates on several levels of communication simultaneously, and each of these operations can be seen as a communicative function. When describing a communicative function, it is necessary to distinguish which respective level of communication is being analyzed.
This article deals with different approaches towards linguistic pragmatics, in particular with the difference between the general concept of pragmatics and the pragmatics of a particular language. In recent decades, the scope and content of linguistic pragmatics has been accounted for in various ways, from very broad to rather restricted. In this article, the notion of pragmatic perspective in language analysis and description is adopted as a suitable concept, i.e. pragmatics is not understood as a separate component (level) of a language system even though the links between semantics and pragmatics are indisputable. The notion of pragmatic perspective in linguistic analysis stresses the fact that each element of a natural language has its pragmatic dimension. Most importantly, this concept entails that the field of pragmatics should deal not only with signs in the classical sense, i.e. from this viewpoint, Morris' canonical definition of pragmatics is abandoned. Furthermore, some examples of pragmatic description of language-specific phenomena are discussed, in particular the pragmatic interpretation of the Czech conjunction a (and) and of the means of personal and social deixis in Czech.
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