The Pragmatic Aspects Of Speech Acts

Abstract

Pragmatics and sociolinguistics view the speech acts as the smallest unit of analysis in any speech event. The latter is defined as a “socially accepted” and “patterned sequence” in which the participants of specific speech community are involved. Speech community
is used to refer to a group of participants who intuitively know how to behave in a specific speech event. Examples of the speech events are conversations, jokes, sermons, interview, prayers or political speeches (peñalosa,1981:71).