Halyna D. Malyk Speech Acts and Events

Relationship between syntactic form and illocutionary force

Utterance	Syntactic form	Illocutionary force
Do exercise 2.	Imperative	Directive
Where does Mary work?	Wh-Interrogative	Wh-Question
Do you know Mary's sister?	Yes-No Interrogative	Yes-No Question
It is dark	Declatative	Representative
You're fired.	Declarative	Declaration
How clever of you!	Declarative	Expressive

However, as we can see from the table, the correspondence between each of the categories of illocutionary act and a particular syntactic form is not always one-to-one. In some cases, there is only a partial correspondence:

• 
  an imperative is used to issue directives;
  
• 
  a yes-no interrogative is used to issue yes-no questions;
  
• 
  a declarative form is used to issue representatives and commissives;
  
• 
  an exclamatory is used to issue expressives.
  

In general, an illocutionary act is issued directly when the syntactic form of the utterance matches the illocutionary force of the utterance. An illocutionary act is issued indirectly when the syntactic form of the utterance does not match the illocutionary force of the utterance.

Thus, a declarative used to make a statement is a direct speech act, but a declarative used to make a request is an indirect speech act. The utterance It's cold outside is a declarative when it is used to make a statement that can be paraphrased as I hereby tell you about the weather and it is functioning as a direct speech act. When the utterance It's cold outside is used to make a command/request, that can be paraphrased as I hereby request of you that you close the door, it is functioning as an indirect speech act.

Indirect speech acts are generally associated with greater politeness in English than direct speech acts. In order to under-stand why, we have to look at a bigger picture than just a single utterance performing a single speech act.