Meaning Of Speech Act By John Searle

1. The speech act and other important terminology in cross-cultural research
The definition of speech act is rather self explanatory, actually it can be easily derived just from its name: an act, committed through only the use of speech. We constantly perform speech acts while we interact with other people by simply greeting them or apologising for something. John Searle, one of the most widely known scholars in this particular field, describes it as a minimal unit of discourse, and he also proposes the assortment of speech act into five different categories, namely: directives (e.g., requests, commands), commissives (e.g., promises, threats), representatives (e.g., assertions, claims), declaratives (e.g., declaring war), and expressives (e.g.,

Although this theory was created in 1978 and therefore was subject to criticism and proposed modifications in the upcoming years, it still provides a functional and useful structure for speech act analysis. The theory introduces the concept of 'face ' which basically means an individual 's positive self-image. Everyone has two types of face needs, positive and negative ones. While the positive face needs include someone 's need to be approved of and liked by others or to be respected by others, negative face needs materialise in the need of privacy, autonomy and independence. Furthermore, there are also threats to one 's face which are consistently called 'face threatening acts '. People generally seek to avoid threatening or damaging someone else 's face and therefore they resort to positive and negative politeness strategies such as being indirect, making an apology, showing friendliness or solidarity. The most rewarding and interesting aspect of this theory is watching how people in certain situations differ from the predictions in regard to their use of politeness strategies, or how differently various nations or cultures use these strategies in the same situations. (Daly, Holmes et al.,