2026-05-10T07:59:27.597Z http://ezaposleni.singidunum.ac.rs/rest/sciNaucniRezultati/oai

ezaposleni.singidunum.ac.rs/rest/sciNaucniRezultati/oai:1:2547 2014-06-24T09:21:23Z 1

Speech Acts Theory- Gender Perspective 2014 http://ezaposleni.singidunum.ac.rs/rest/sciNaucniRezultati/oai/record/1/2547 V. Bošković Speech Acts Theory- Gender Perspective This paper focuses on the gender perspective of speech acts theory as one of the vital theories of language usage which is based on logical positivism and language meaning. The idea of speech acts theory was developed by language philosophers (e.g. John Austin) and further analyzed by linguists. Its basic principle is the idea that all speakers actually perform an action while speaking. In other words, what we all use in everyday communication is called ‘performative utterance’- the situation when our speech acts symbolize our real acts or when we actually perform an action by speaking (e.g. ‘I declare war’, ‘I apologize’, verbs such as ‘bet’, ‘congratulate’, ‘promise’, etc). The most usual form of performatives are explicit performatives, which are used to express a certain meaning (‘I promise that I will come’). The other rare type of performatives are implicit performatives, which are used depending on the context of the speaker. Apart from performatives, the speech acts theory also defines expositives, which are used to depict an announcement (‘I conclude that…’) or speaker’s attitude. In this paper, we will try and discover which gender uses which type of performatives, in which situations, and why. There are three types of speech acts: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. The paper explains the theory and usage of all three speech acts, with special emphasis on the differences in the language usage between males and females. The aim of this paper is to, first of all, define the theoretical approach to speech acts theory, and to explain the speech acts theory with reference to speech acts by the two genders. In the conclusion, the paper offers a brief analysis of the usage of various types of speech acts depending on the gender of the speaker. Key words: speech act, performatives, gender conferenceObject FLTAL 2014