Defining the Unit of a Speech Act

Though speech acts have been studied extensively for almost half a century now, there is still a considerable amount of vagueness and ambiguity associated with the term.

In Austin’s and Searle’s writings, and in many consequent studies, the term speech act has been used interchangeably with the term utterance and sometimes even with the term sentence. No clear definition of the length of the speech act has been provided, nor what is usually contained in a single speech act. Examples used by the authors are usually limited to one utterance or a single adjacency pair without attempts to limit the borders of speech acts in sequence. Others, like van Dijk (1977a, 1977b), for example, deal with speech acts on a global level, namely, macro speech acts, which are useful for explaining how a whole presentation can act as an offer (sales presentation) or an apology (financial report on reasons for incurred losses). In these cases, the macro speech act could be seen to be similar to the communicative purpose of the event. Ferrara (1985) and van Dijk (1977b) claim that there is a hierarchy of speech acts, which is the basis for the second premise of the model, namely that there are levels of intentionality. In line with this theory, not all the speech acts in a given sequence are directly relevant or connected to the macro speech act and it is possible to “distinguish between ‘subordinate’ and ‘superordinate’ speech act relations, e.g. when some speech act is an auxiliary act with respect to another speech act”

(van Dijk, 1977b, p. 228). This hierarchy of speech acts served as a model for the hierarchy of intentionality represented in Figure 1. McGee (1999) uses the term speech act to refer to the introductions and endings of presentations, which would be mid-level units of intentionality. These mid-level intentions can also be termed macro speech acts as they too, like the global level, contain subordinate speech acts. So the question arises as to which of these levels should be taken as the analytical unit of the model. As already

pointed out, according to Searle (1969) “speech acts are the basic or minimal units of linguistic communication” (p. 16). Therefore, for the purposes of this study, what is needed is the smallest unit in the hierarchy of intentionality, which is a simple sentence or proposition or any element that can be substituted by a proposition (for example: “First,

…” = “This is the first point of my presentation, …”). Its boundaries are usually signalled by a short pause in the presentation. Complex sentences need to be broken down into simple ones in the analysis. The choice of a simple proposition as the basis for setting the boundaries of speech acts is also supported by Searle’s (1965) propositional content conditions and propositional content rule. Further instructions for researchers as to what counts as a single speech act include:

1. Single word speech acts: yes/no or other one word answers to questions; ordinals or other links at the beginning of the sentence which explain something about the structure of the whole of the discourse, i.e. connect parts of the discourse NOT parts of the sentence or two speech acts.

2. Simple sentence speech acts: SVO/Adv; SSVO/Adv; SVVO/Adv; SVOO/Adv;

SVO/Adv, Adv; these are all counted as single speech acts.

3. Complex sentence speech acts: S(relative)VO/Adv; SVO(relative);

SVO/Adv&VO/Adv; Link, SVO/Adv; these are counted as two speech acts.

There is a problem of compatibility in this system since grammatical categories are used to describe what is essentially a pragmatic concept. The use of grammatical categories to delimit the boundaries of an act was considered necessary, though thematic roles could also have been used. This system was worked out during the course of several years based on intuitive speech act separation of dozens of presentations by at least three

different researchers. The current inter-rater reliability of this system is 98%, so the use of grammatical categories, though questionable, has led to a very reliable definition of the basic unit of analysis.

Another reason for the use of grammatical categories is that it satisfies the second requirement of Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) guidelines and criteria for developing an analytical system. These guidelines state that: “A. The descriptive apparatus should be finite... B. The symbols and terms in the descriptive apparatus should be precisely relatable to their exponents in the data... C. The whole of the data should be describable... D. There must be at least one impossible combination of symbols” (pp.15-16). With the above description, it is much easier to relate a speech act to the exponents in the transcription of a presentation.

In order to describe the mid-level aims in the hierarchy of intentionality, it is possible to take Bhatia’s (1993) steps of promotional genres as intermediary levels, linking the minimal units to the communicative purpose. As previously mentioned, the commercial aim of business presentations means that they too, like the sales promotion letter and the job application letter, “should be regarded as instances of what we can call promotional genres” (Bhatia, 1993, p. 74). This is the reason why the presenter should use the following moves, which are characteristic of promotional genres:

1. Establishing credentials – either the credentials of the company by listing some of its past successes or the credentials of the presenter by explaining why s/he is the authority on this topic and is giving the presentation;

2. Introducing the offer – (i) Offering the product or service, (ii) Detailing the offer, (iii) Indicating the value of the offer;

3. Offering incentives – providing discounts or extra services for immediate or bulk buying;

4. Enclosing documents – giving handouts, reports, brochures, samples, order forms or business cards;

5. Soliciting a response – setting up a next meeting or providing a deadline for a decision;

6. Using pressure tactics – claiming that the product is not available elsewhere or that it is likely to run out so the customers should buy immediately;

7. Ending politely – thanking the audience for attending and inviting questions.

Bhatia’s points seem also to be supported by several authors of presentation skills textbooks. We saw that Bienvenu (2000) listed goodwill, expertise, power and confidence as the four components of credibility. McCarthy and Hatcher (2002) included credibility, or as they called it ethos, as one of the major three elements of successful presentations along with logos and pathos.

In the analysis of a presentation, after identifying the speech acts, it is also possible to look at the moves that the presenter uses to accomplish the aim and examine the hierarchy of goals within the presentation. Figure 3 is a graphic representation of the hierarchy of intentionality in a business presentation including Bhatia’s seven moves of promotional genres.

Figure 3. Hierarchy of intentionality including Bhatia's promotional genre moves.