Indirect Speech Acts: Between Modern Linguistics and Arabic Linguistic Tradition
Authors: Abdulla Hisham Ibrahim 
Published: October 2019

The present paper is part of a larger piece of work intended to challenge the long-standing assumption that speech acts, as linguistic phenomena, were first discovered by modern language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century ; it is a commonplace assumption in modern linguistic literature that language philosophers like John Austin , Ludwig Wittgenstein were the first to propose the theory , and that the following generation of philosophers like John Searle and J. Sadock added very important developments to it such as the notion of indirect speech acts (ISAs). The researcher's aim in this paper is to question the above assumption about the discovery of the phenomenon of indirect speech acts, and to trace it back to Arab linguists. Thus the problem or the question that the present paper sets out to answer is whether the phenomenon has a longer history than is claimed in the literature , and whether Arab linguists were well acquainted with it. The first part of the paper is a brief account of the notion of ISAs as it appears in modern linguistic literature in the west with special reference to the often quoted samples of questions used for forces other than seeking information. The focus is narrowed on two approaches to explaining the phenomena, namely, the idiom or ambiguity approach proposed by generative semanticists like Sadock(1974) and the inferential approach adopted by Searle (1975). Both approaches subscribe to the literal force hypothesis (LFH), but they part company when it comes to the nature of the explanation they offer. According to Sadock, ISAs are idioms and there is ambiguity in their literal senses, whereas Searle argues that ISAs are speech acts performed indirectly (and simultaneously) through the performance of other speech acts, and that the additional indirect force is acquired by virtue of a pragmatic inference and with the help of an inference trigger and a series of inferential steps. The controversy between the two approaches sometimes boils down to a single important question which is the source of the heated debate, i.e., " Does an utterance lose or retain its literal force when used as an ISA ?". A third approach to ISAs is a radical pragmatic solution ; it rejects the (LFH) in principle and denies the existence of literal force and consequently cancels the problem of ISAs. The second part of the paper deals with the Arabs' contribution to the theory, comparing their findings with those of modern linguists of the west. The method adopted by the researcher is using quotations from the books of traditional Arab and Muslim linguists such as rhetoricians and jurisprudents in an attempt to investigate his hypothesis that Arab and Muslim linguists were well acquainted with the concept of ISAs. Using these quotations, he sets out to trace the main features of the theory of ISAs back to Arab and Muslim linguists who showed unprecedented understanding of the main tenets of the theory. Here, too, following the literature, the focus is narrowed on questions as a sample of ISAs.