An overview of speech acts in English [articol]

Abstract

Last century philosophers made a great step forward in understanding the way in which we use words in order to achieve something in the real world. They pointed to the fact that we perform speech acts when we speak. The production of speech acts is governed by some rules which help us understand the utterance meaning and decode the speaker meaning. Moreover, in a discourse, the speech acts are organized linearly in sequences of micro-speech acts, and hierarchically in macro-speech acts, which are associated with an entire piece of discourse. As the right choice of speech acts in advertisements contribute to the achievement of the advertiser’s goals, the present article selects its examples from various advertisements placed in some English magazines.