SPECIFIC CHARACTER OF EVALUATION SPEECH ACTS

Abstract

In this article questions connected with the analysis of the appearance of the evaluation in the utterance are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of evaluation speech acts. The minimum unit of communication is speech act. The structure of the speech act includes four levels: locution, proposition, illocution and perlocution. In the evaluation speech acts, semantic basis is the category of evaluation. Based on semantic and pragmatic properties of the object of our study, we propose to distinguish the following types of evaluation speech acts: 1) focus on the subject; 2) focus on the object.

Among evaluation speech acts, oriented on the object, proper evaluation speech acts (praise, condemnation) and emotional evaluation speech acts (admiration, anger, respect) can be selected. This approach is based on the fact that the evaluative verbs are direct representatives of illocutionary intention of evaluation speech acts. So, we consider that the classification of evaluation speech acts can rely on semantic and pragmatic features of evaluative verbs.