This paper investigates the speech act of agreeing in a corpus of British dramatic texts, as a response uttered by a second speaker in reaction to a first speaker’s evaluative act, which may consist of either explicit or implicit evaluative assessments or questions of the conductive type or rhetorical questions. Special attention is paid to strategic discursive actions the second speaker can make use of in order to show his/her agreement: on the one hand, repetition by second speaker and the monosyllabic ‘yes’ as prototypical instruments for serving the pragmatic function of agreement; on the other hand, reactive speaker contributions such as re-elaborative responses capable of functioning as highly cooperative. The analysis reveals that agreement involves some type of modification along a scale of intensity, without which its illocutionary force risks misunderstanding.

The speech act of agreeing in 20th century dramatic dialogues / Diani, Giuliana. - STAMPA. - 42 (Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa)(2000), pp. 353-379. ((Intervento presentato al convegno English Diachronic Pragmatics. IX Convegno Nazionale di Storia della Lingua Inglese tenutosi a Napoli nel 13-15 maggio 1999.

I documenti presenti in Iris Unimore sono rilasciati con licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia, salvo diversa indicazione.
In caso di violazione di copyright, contattare Supporto Iris

Powered by IRIS-about IRIS-Utilizzo dei cookie

 Copyright © 2021