Scientific novelty of the theme: to account for the fact that sequences of speech acts have dependencies of more than one conversational turn.
to develop a model of referential speech acts that rely on the identification of previous speech acts and the state of the prevailing context space for their ‘correct’ analysis.
to highlight the difference between the underlying act, or function of the utterance, and the behavior that it represents in context.
to show that the theoretical model can be applied to and validated against real conversational data.
Practical value of the theme:The state-trace model characterizes many distinct types of speech acts from the utterance and the context combined. These are roughly representative of the basic speech act types, which can later be used in the characterization of other speech acts. And it also consists of underlining two points of view that pose serious obstacles to coming to a total understanding about how we use language to communicate. The first is a kind of speciesism: because discourse is language, it must have its explanation rooted in the field of linguistics. Discourse couldn’t be distinguished from other theories such as cognition, mental models, agency, belief structures, action and socio-ethnological factors too. This makes it very difficult to keep all the issues in play at the same time, but it is a mistake to think that any approach could be complete without at least addressing how it fits in with other related areas.
The structure of the theme:The research work consists of Introduction: - explain the importance, purpose, significance and the objectives of the present work. The first chapter concerns the historical and theoretical backgrounds of philosophical foundations of speech act theory and the theory of discourse interpretation. Chapter II analyzes current researches focused on linguistic approaches to discourse analysis and argued for the model that provides a powerful formalism for the characterization of a wide variety of different basic speech acts. Chapter II is based on providing a new approach to speech act recognition, built on the foundations of existing work, and in particular extending earlier research as detailed in Schiffrin. The work covers conclusion and the list of used references. The work consists of 62 pages.