The speech act of agreeing in 20th century dramatic dialogues

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.