Are Speech Acts Universal or Culture and Language - Specific?

Are Speech Acts Universal or Culture and Language - Specific?

Speech acts have been claimed by some to operate by universal pragmatic principles (Austin, (1962),  Searle (1969, 1975), Brown & Levinson (1978)). Others have shown them to vary in conceptualization and verbalization across cultures and languages (Wong, 1994; Wierzbicka, 1985). Although this debate has generated over three decades of research, only the last 15 years marked a shift from an intuitively based approach to an empirically based one, which “has focused on the perception and production of speech acts by learners of a second or foreign language (in the most cases, English as a second or foreign language, i.e., ESL and EFL) at varying stages of language proficiency and in different social interactions” (Cohen, 1996, p. 385).  Blum Kulka et. al., (1989) argue that there is a strong need to complement theoretical studies of speech acts with empirical studies, based on speech acts produced by native speakers of individual languages in strictly defined contexts.

The illocutionary choices embraced by individual languages reflect what Gumperz (1982) calls “cultural logic” (pp. 182-185). Consider the following passage:

The fact that two speakers whose sentences are quite grammatical can differ radically in their interpretation of each other’s verbal strategies indicates that conversational management does rest on linguistic knowledge. But to find out what that knowledge is we must abandon the existing views of communication which draw a basic distinction between cultural or social knowledge on the one hand and linguistic signaling processes on the other. (pp. 185-186)

Differences in “cultural logic” embodied in individual languages involve the implementation of various linguistic mechanisms.  As numerous studies have shown, these mechanisms are rather culture-specific and may cause breakdowns in inter-ethnic communication. Such communication breakdowns are largely due to a language transfer at the sociocultural level where cultural differences play a part in selecting among the potential strategies for realizing a given speech act. Hence the need to make the instruction of speech acts an instrumental component of every ESL/ EFL curriculum.