关键词: 言语行为; 多模态; 语料库; 语用学; 范式创新

Abstract: Live speech acts in situated discourse are performed by live “whole persons” who interact with the environment in a multimodal way. In this sense, speech acts are suggested to be studied in the perspective of human behavior and in the framework of social situation. With the help of Corpus Linguistics and multimodal approach to language study, researchers are able to further investigate pragmatic issues to develop a better understanding on human interaction and refine traditional pragmatic theories or concepts. Adopting the method of Multimodal Corpus Linguistics and the basic thought of Simulative Modeling, the pilot study in this paper shows that the live illocutionary act is rooted in the whole multimodal interaction of speakers, thus the illocutionary force is multimodal in nature. Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices range in its scope from language structures, prosodic features to non-verbal gestures, etc. All these resources, which are impacted by speakers’ occurrent emotions and other factors, work in a collaborative way to help speakers to perform illocutionary acts. These findings are in compliance with Austin’s observation on the accompaniments of the utterance when a speaker performs an illocutionary act. The findings extend the inquiry of Speech Act Theory and develop the concept of Illocutionary Force Indicating Device by using the novel method and new linguistic data. This paper provides a reference for further study of pragmatic issues based on multimodal corpus, multimodal approach to pragmatic study, or even Multimodal (Corpus) Pragmatics, therefore, should receive due attention.

Keywords: speech acts; multimodal; corpus; pragmatics; paradigm innovation