Simple and Complex Extralinguistic Communicative Acts

Simple and Complex Extralinguistic Communicative Acts Francesca M. Bosco (bosco@psych.unito.it) Katiuscia Sacco (sacco@psych.unito.it) Livia Colle (colle@psych.unito.it) Romina Angeleri (angeleri@psych.unito.it) Ivan Enrici (enrici@psych.unito.it) Gianluca Bo (gianluca.bo@metis-ricerche.it) Bruno G. Bara (bara@psych.unito.it) Centro di Scienza Cognitiva e Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita di Torino via Po 14 - 10123 Torino, Italia Abstract The present research aims to investigate the distinction between simple and complex communicative acts in the context of extralinguistic communication. We propose that, within the same pragmatic phenomena studied - which are standard communicative acts, deceit and irony - a simple communicative act is easier to comprehend than a complex one. Our proposal is based on the different complexity of inferential processes involved in comprehending communicative acts. We provide empirical evidence in support to our hypothesis with an experiment on children aged 5;5 to 8;6 years. We consider our results as favoring a unitary model of communication, where ‘linguistic’ and ‘extralinguistic’ are similar expressive channels underlying the same cognitive faculty. Introduction Philosopher John Searle (1975) introduced the classical distinction between direct and indirect speech acts. A direct speech act consists of a sentence where a speaker means exactly and literally what she is saying, for instance [1] 'Please pass me the salt', proffered by the speaker to obtain the salt, located on the table, from her table-companion. On the contrary, an indirect speech act consists of a sentence by which the speaker communicates to the hearer more than what she is actually saying. For instance [2] ‘Do you mind passing me the salt? ’ or [3] ‘My soup is lacking in salt’, proffered by a speaker in order to obtain the same goal as in the previous example. Searle claims that the primary illocutionary force of an indirect speech act is derived from the literal meaning via a series of inferential steps. The hearer's inferential process is triggered by the assumption that the speaker is following the Principle of Cooperation (Grice, 1975), together with the evidence of an inconsistency between the utterance and the context of enunciation. According to Searle, the hearer tries first to interpret the utterance literally, and only after the failure of this attempt, due to the irrelevance of the literal meaning, does he look for a different one, which conveys the primary illocutionary force. In this view, an indirect speech act is intrinsically harder to comprehend than a direct one. Indeed, understanding a direct speech act such as [1] is straightforward, that is, it does not require inferences, while understanding indirect speech acts, such as [2] and [3] relies on some kind of common knowledge. However, the length of the inferential path is not the same for each indirect speech act. For instance [3], an example of non conventional indirect speech act, requires a greater number of inferences than [2], an example of conventional direct speech act. Some authors have criticized this position for different reasons (Clark, 1979; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Recanati, 1995). In particular, Gibbs (1986; 1994) shows that a speaker can use an indirect act when she thinks that there might be obstacles against the request she intends to formulate: for example, when the speaker does not know whether the hearer owns the object she desires, he can use a conventional indirect request. The context specifies the necessity of using a conventional indirect and thus helps the hearer to understand the intended meaning more quickly. Gibbs suggests that, in such a circumstance, the partner infers the meaning of a conventional indirect speech act via an habitual shortcut that facilitates its comprehension. In addition, Bara and Bucciarelli (1998) point out that for 2;6-3 year old children conventional indirects, such as ‘Would you like to sit down? ’, compared to direct speech acts, such as ‘What is your name? ’, are equally easy to comprehend. On the contrary, the same children have difficulties with non-conventional indirects: for instance they find it hard to understand that the answer ‘It's raining’ to the proposal ‘Let's go out and play’ corresponds to a refusal. On the basis of the Cognitive Pragmatics theory, by Airenti, Bara and Colombetti (1993a), Bara, Bosco and Bucciarelli (1999) advanced an alternative explanation that constitutes the theoretical basis for the present research. The authors propose to abandon the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts and to adopt a new one between simple and complex speech acts, based on the increasing complexity of the inferential processes underlying their comprehension. This distinction has the distinct advantage of applying not only to standard speech acts, but also to non standard ones, like irony and deceit.