2.3.1 Advising as a speech act
As advising is often considered as a speech act, it is first examined within the theoretical framework of the Speech Act Theory proposed by Austin (1962)and developed by Searle (1969, 1976, 1979).
Austin (1962) divides speech acts into five categories in terms of their illocutionary force, namely verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and expositives. Advising is put into the category of “exercitives,” which are“the giving of a decision in favor of or against a certain course of action, or advocacy of it” (Austin, 1962, p. 154). Later, Searle (1969, 1976, 1979) revises Austin’s (1962) taxonomy of speech acts and puts forward a revised taxonomy of speech acts, namely representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. Advising is put into the category of directives, which are“attempts (of varying degrees,…) by the speaker to get the hearer to do something” (Searle, 1976, p. 11).
Searle (1969, p. 66) further analyzes the illocutionary act of advising (the prototypical verb is “advise,” as used by Searle) based on the felicity conditions, which advising should satisfy:
Propositional content: Future act A of H.
Preparatory condition: (1) H has some reason to believe A will benefit H. (2) It is not obvious to both S and H that H will do A in the normal course of events.
Sincerity condition: S believes A will benefit H.
Essential condition: Counts as an undertaking to the effect that A is in H’s best interest.
Comment: Contrary to what one might suppose advice is not a species of requesting. It is interesting to compare “advise” with“urge,” “advocate” and “recommend.” Advising you is not trying to get you to do something in the sense that requesting is. Advising is more like telling you what is best for you.
Since Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts is widely accepted, advising is often examined as one typical speech act of directives (Liu & Zhao, 2007).Searle’s (1969) analysis of the illocutionary act of advising in terms of the felicity conditions is also widely accepted, for example, by Waring (2007, p.367), who points out that “advising refers to any activity that involves one party conveying to another what the former believes to be beneficial to the latter regarding some performance or behavior.”
Although advising is done in the best interest of the hearer, it is, in essence, a face threatening act (Brown & Levinson, 1978/1987; Martínez-Flor,2010). This is another salient characteristic of advising. Since advising is one of the “especially face-threatening speech acts” (Tracy, 2002, p. 72), it is“usually mitigated or softened in some way, whether it be lexically,semantically, or syntactically, unless the relationship between interactants is so intimate that mitigation is not required” (Koike, 1994, p. 517).
This intrinsic characteristic of advising is also indicated by the use of downgraders in the process of advising. For example, Martínez-Flor (2010, p.261) examines the downgraders in English and divides them into three categories: downtoners, including such expressions as “just,” “possibly,”“perhaps,” “probably” and “maybe;” committers, including such as “I think,”“I believe,” “I guess,” “I suppose,” “in my opinion” and “personally;” and forewarn like “I’m not sure, but…”
The tradition of treating advising as a typical speech act has been followed by and maintained in interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, in which the focus is on head acts of an advising act and their internal and external modifications (e.g., DeCapua & Dunham, 2007; Jiang, 2006; Li, 2010;Liu & Zhao, 2007; Matsumura, 2001; Nadeau, 2009; Ohata, 2004; Santos &Silva, 2008). The CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project)model proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) for the speech act of request has been frequently modified and used to investigate advising. For instance, Li(2010) puts all the strategies of suggestion into three categories and nine
sub-categories in terms of the levels of directness: direct strategies, which mainly include mood derivable, performative, pure statement, obligation statement, inclination statement and ability statement; conventionally indirect strategies, which mainly include query preparatory and suggestory formula; and non-conventionally indirect strategies, which mainly consist of hints. Internal modifications are “linguistic elements within the suggestion utterance proper which can mitigate the intrusive force of making the suggestion, but their existence is not essential for the utterance to become a suggestion” (Li, 2010, p. 604). Internal modifications mainly comprise subjectivizers, appealers, past tense forms, cajolers, politeness markers,subjunctive forms and downtoners. External modifications are “linguistic elements or supportive moves which exist outside the suggestion utterance proper and their existence will mitigate the intrusive force of the suggestion”(ibid.). External modifications include grounder, (external) politeness marker,preparatory, downgrading commitment and imposition minimizer. In addition,Martínez-Flor (2005, 2010) also presents a taxonomy of suggestion and the linguistic realization strategies, as shown in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Taxonomy of suggestion and the linguistic realization strategies(Martínez-Flor, 2005, p. 175; 2010, p. 259)
continued:
Although Martínez-Flor’s (2005, 2010) taxonomy is also composed of three categories, it is different from Li’s (2010) classification in naming different categories. Despite this difference, “conventionalized forms” in Martínez-Flor’s (2005, 2010) taxonomy overlap to some extent with“conventionally indirect strategies” in Li’s (2010) classification.
Despite the fact that advising has been widely discussed as a typical speech act in interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, one of the limitations of the studies on advising in these fields is that advising is carefully examined only at the sentential level, not taking into account the sequential discourse features of advising. They are, in this sense, the studies on advising from a micro-perspective. In the next section, the studies on advising from a macro-perspective will be reviewed.