CONTENTS
    INTRODUCTION..............................................................3
    
    1. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: FORM VERSUS FUNCTION............5
    
    2. WHY DO SPEAKERS HAVE TO BE INDIRECT?.......................7
    2.1. The cooperative principle....................................................7
    2.2. The theory of politeness ......................................................8
    
    3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS
    AND "DECIPHER" THEIR MEANING?..................................10
    3.1. The inference theory.........................................................10
    3.2. Indirect speech acts as idioms?.............................................12
    3.3. Other approaches to the problem..........................................13
    
    4. ILLOCUTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCES WITHIN A
    DISCOURSE...................................................................14
    
    5.INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN........16
    6.EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS IN MODERN
    ENGLISH DISCOURSE......................................................18
    6.1. Fiction........................................................................18
    6.2. Publicism.....................................................................20
    6.3. Advertising...................................................................21
    6.4. Anecdotes.....................................................................21
    
    7. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AS A YARDSTICK OF COMMUNI-
    CATIVE MATURITY AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING .........23
    CONCLUSIONS...............................................................25
    
    РЕЗЮМЕ.......................................................................27
    
    LITERATURE.................................................................28
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    INTRODUCTION
    
    "A great deal can be said in the study of
    language without studying speech acts,
    but any such purely formal theory is
    necessarily incomplete. It would be as if
    baseball were studied only as a formal
    system of rules and not as a game."
    John Rogers Searle
    
    
    In the late 1950s, the Oxford philosopher John Austin gave some lectures on how speakers "do things with words" and so invented a theory of "speech acts" [10, 40] which now occupies the central place in pragmatics (pragmatics is the study of how we use language to communicate in a particular context). Austin highlighted the initial contrast between the constative and the performative. While constatives describe a state of affairs, performatives (explicit and implicit) have the potential to bring about a change in some state of affairs. Classical examples of performatives include the naming of a ship, the joining of two persons in marriage, and the sentencing of a criminal by an authorised person. Austin distinguished between the locution of a speech act (the words uttered), its illocution (the intention of the speaker in making the utterance) and its perlocution (its effects, intended or otherwise). Whereas constatives typically have truth conditions to comply with, speech acts must satisfy certain "felicity conditions" in order to count as an action: there must be a conventional procedure; the circumstances and people must be appropriate; the procedure must be executed correctly and completely; often, the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings, etc.
    John Austin's theory of speech acts was generalized to cover all utterances by a student of Austin's, John Rogers Searle [43, 69]. ............