ILLOCUTION AND PERLOCUTION OF FLATTERY SPEECH ACT (ON THE SAMPLES FROM ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTIONAL CHARACTER SPEECH)

Abstract

The paper is focused on studying the illocutionary and perlocutionary components of flattery speech act of in the character speech of the Englishlanguage fictional discourse. It has been established that speech act is a minimal unit of speech activity and is characterized by its intentionality, conventionality, addressability, sincerity, success. The central components of the pragmatic structure of a speech act are the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary components. It has been found out that within various taxonomies of speech acts, flattery belongs to behabitives, expressives or phatic speech acts. In the paper, flattery has been defined as a pseudo-sincere positive-evaluative manipulative syncretic speech act, aimed at gaining benefit by the speaker, characterized mainly by the overlapping of the addressee and the object of positive evaluation. It has been established that the subjects of assessment in flattery speech act are the addressee’s appearance, his moral and intellectual properties, skills, achievements and actions. In terms of status, in most cases, flattery is directed from a communicator lower in status to a higher one, however, apologetic flattery can be directed from the speaker of the same or even lower social status. The addressee of flattery is insincere and has selfish intentions: they are trying to hide their true intentions and disguise flattery as praise or a compliment. The main illocutionary aims of flattery speech act are seen as the intention to give pleasure to the addressee, to improve their emotional state with the help of insincere positive evaluation of the object’s features; the intention to convince the addressee of the speaker’s sincerity; the hidden intention to obtain some benefit, material or immaterial; the hidden intention to encourage the addressee to take actions beneficial to the addressee; the hidden intention to obtain forgiveness for some fault of the addressee. The intended perlocutionary effect of flattery speech act is achieved if the speaker is able to disguise flattery as praise or compliment. If the speaker succeeds in this, the addressee’s response will be acceptance of flattery, gratitude, pleasant surprise, mirror reaction, and the rejection of flattery out of modesty. If the speaker’s intentions are correctly decoded by the addressee, then the flattery will not be accepted.