Indirect directives in recipes: a cross-linguistic perspective

• Authors: Rita Brdar-Szabó , Mario Brdar
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The present paper is intended as a cross-linguistic study of the range of possible realizations of instructional speech acts as a special type of directives, as realized in the domain of cooking recipes. Even a cursory comparison of orders as directive speech acts across languages brings to light an extreme degree of variation concerning their formal realization. While imperatives are virtually the only possibility in English, a contrastive linguistic perspective reveals that other construction types are attested in other languages, instead, or in addition to the imperative. The central goal of the present paper is to shed light on the motives for these intralingual and interlingual similarities. The data from Germanic, Romance, Slavic languages, and Hungarian are analyzed against the background of the speech-act scenario model, and then discussed with the help of two cultural models of HELP, which are claimed to provide the basis for the motivation of the cross-linguistic distribution of various constructions.

Keywords

EN

Speech act; directive; indirectness; metonymy; cultural models

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 107-131

Dates

published

2009-01-01

online

2009-07-06

Contributors

author

Rita Brdar-Szabó

• Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest

author

Mario Brdar

• Josip Juraj Strossmayer University, Osijek

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-009-0006-x