An Indirect Approach to Types of Speech Acts

Cons ide ra t i on of the s i m i l a r i t y between d i rec t and ind i rec t speech act unders tand ing g ive r i s e to the notion that taxonomies of speech acts may not be he lp fu l in modell ing language understanding. A computer model which t reats represent a t i o n s o f d i r e c t and i n d i r e c t speech acts s i m i l a r l y and succesful ly has been implemented without any such taxonomy and without an e x p l i c i t r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of the d i f ference between d i rec t and ind i rec t speech acts. I n t r oduc t i on . Speech acts theory is of great in te res t t o many w o r k e r s f r om v a r i o u s d i s c i p l i n e s i n t e r e s t e d in n a t u r a l language. One of the problems that t he i r work has h igh l ighted is that of the ind i rec t speech act: An utterance which the speaker makes ca r ry an i l l o c u t l o n a r y force more important than, and in addi t ion t o , the i l l o c u t l o n a r y fo rce d e r i v a b l e from the l i t e r a l meaning of that utterance (Searle 1975). Another problem which has rece ived c o n s i d erab le a t t e n t i o n (eg A u s t i n 1962, Sear le 1976, Dore 1977, Katz 1977, Vendler 1972 Hancher 1979, S t i l e s 1981 and many o thers ) is the c l a s s i f i c a t i o n o f speech a c t s i n t o types. Here there are two questions: 1) What types of speech acts are there? 2 ) What s h o u l d t h e i r c r i t e r i a f o r c l a s s i f i c a t i o n be? I am going to suggest in the f o l l o w i n g tha t these quest ions may be avoided as the n o t i o n of speech act types is not e s s e n t i a l f o r n a t u r a l language understanding (NLU). Fur thermore I am going to reach th is pos i t ion by considering the understanding of a few d i rec t and i nd i rec t speech ac ts and by argu ing tha t d i r e c t and i n d i r e c t speech a c t s may be u n d e r s t o o d by a s i n g l e mechanism. For brev i ty the discussion is r e s t r i c t e d to REQUEST and INFORM type speech ac ts . An Example. Consider such utterances as:1) I t s co ld in here. 2) Turn on the hea ter .