Analyze the following extract in terms of the related theories of pragmatics and conversation analysis.
“Have you had a letter from Lucy?” Fred Henry asked his sister.
“Last week,” came the neutral reply.
“And what does she say?”
There was no answer.
“Does she ask you to go and stop there?” persisted Fred Henry.
“She says I can if I like.”
“Well, then, you'd better. Tell her you'll come on Monday.”
This was received in silence.
“That's what you'll do then, is it?” said Fred Henry, in some exasperation.
But she made no answer.
(D. H. Lawrence, The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter)
According to speech act theory, the speech acts in this dialogue fail and it violates cooperative principle.
Speech act theory believes that there are three basic senses in which in saying something one is doing something and three kinds of acts are performed simultaneously. The first sense is an ordinary one. When we speak we move our vocal organs and produce a number of sounds, organized in a certain way and with a certain meaning. The act performed in this sense is called a locutionary act. When we speak, we not only produce some units of language with certain meanings, but also make clear our purpose in producing them, the way we intend them to be understood, or they also have certain forces. This is the second sense in which to say something is to do something, and the act performed is known as an illocutionary act. The third sense in which to say something can mean to do something concerns the consequential effects of a locution upon the hearer. By telling somebody something the speaker may change the opinion of the hearer on something, or mislead him, or surprise him, or induce him to do something, etc. Whether or not these effects are intended by the speaker, they can be regarded as part of the act that the speaker has performed. This fact, which performed through, by means of, a locutionary act, is called a perlocutionary act. Defined in this way, the locutionary act is what linguists have been studying all along. That is, how sounds, words and sentences are made, and what inherent meanings they have. The perlocutionary act involves many psychological and social factors, of which we are still more or less in the dark. So the illocutionary act is what Austin really drives at. In this sense, speech act theory is in fact a theory of the illocutionary act. The accomplishment of an illocutionary act depends on a set of conditions called “appropriateness conditions” or “felicity conditions”. These relate to how, when, where and by whom speech acts are performed. Only when these conditions are fulfilled, can a speech act be said to be appropriate.
In the above passage, two of the four questions were not answered and the other two were responded to with little enthusiasm. In addition, the acts of commanding and warning were also unsuccessful. We can have a better understanding of such speech acts after we know more background information of this dialogue. Mabel’s family had been well off, but after her father died, there was nothing but debt and threatening. Mabel had suffered a lot and now she felt it was enough that this was the end and there was no way out. She seemed ready to put an end to her life. But her three brothers did not share the same life as Mabel, nor did they feel really concerned about her. Although they could not even control their own situations of life, the brothers, Fred Henry in particular, showed a strong tendency to dominate Mabel. From the above information we can see that the reason why the speech acts were not successful was that the felicity conditions were unfulfilled. Mabel was simply unwilling to answer her brothers’ questions but they did the asking nevertheless.