La representación de Dios y su característica psicológica… 67

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Brown and Yule (1983: 231-233) consider Speech Act Theory a valuable tool for a discourse analyst. They note, after Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) and Coulthard (1977), that speakers come to link two utterances that do not seem to be connected at face value in order to construct a coherent piece of discourse. It happens because "there is an assumed coherent structure to discourse over and above the more frequently described structure of sentential form" (Brown and Yule 1983: 231). Nevertheless, the authors point out a few flaws in the speech act framework. First, they explain that a speech act need not be just one ‘typical utterance,’ but it often constitutes one complex, longer syntactic chunk or a string of sentences, so that "a fairly extended utterance may be interpreted as a warning or as an apology" (Brown and Yule 1983: 233). This is observable in my data as well:

impolite accusations, warnings, criticisms, denials etc. are sometimes quite complex and consist of longer sequences of sentences. In many cases the speech acts are made of stages:

first, there is a longish preparation (e.g. a narrative) for the speech act and then there is the speech act proper, as in the following examples from the data (the speech acts proper have been underlined):

Miesiac pertraktacji nie wywarl skutku.Osoba sprzedajaca powinna znalezc sie pod,,lupa,, wladz Allegro,a niewykluczone ze i prokuratury-patrz,produkowanie kopii monet.Mysle,ze oszukanych sa setki,lecz ze wzgledu na male straty-odpuszczaja.Uwazajcie!!!

[A month of negotiations has brought no results. The seller should be monitored by Allegro.pl authorities or even by prosecution –cf. producing counterfeit coins. I think there might me hundreds of deceived clients but they simple let go because of negligible losses.

Beware!]

Cyfroman w "o mnie" pisze, że aparaty pochodzą bezpośrednio z Jap. Otrzymałem aparat

"M. in China" b. instrukcji i tylko z dwoma językami ang. i jap. Nie chcę zwrotu pieniędzy, ale próby kontaktu każą mi przestrzec. Kupujcie gdzie indziej

[In the ‘About me’ section, Cyfroman (the seller’s username – A.W.) writes that the cameras come straight from Japan. I received one ‘made in China’ operating in two languages only – English and Japanese, without the manual. I don’t want my money back, but my attempts at contacting him lead me to Warn you. Shop somewhere else]

Second, they support the view that one utterance can perform multiple functions at once and their conventional categorisation may result in "inappropriate view of what speakers do with utterances" (Brown and Yule 1983: 233). Third, Brown and Yule accuse Speech Act Theory of failing to explain "how a particular set of linguistic elements, uttered in a particular conversational context, comes to receive a particular interpreted meaning" (ibid.).

Schiffrin (1994) sides with Brown and Yule (1983) on the issue of a single utterance being multifunctional and justifies such a claim within discourse analysis:

"[s]ome utterances have multiple functions because one act is being performed by way of another: they are called "indirect" speech acts. The conditions underlying speech acts provide an analytical resource for indirectness (...) When more than one act is performed by a single utterance, the conditions for the two speech acts nevertheless have a systematic relationship

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to one another. Thus (...) relationships between underlying conditions (...) allow utterances to do more than one thing at a time" (Schiffin 1994: 60).

This is observable in my data as well: the speech acts (and the resultant strategies) often cannot be labelled in a clear-cut manner. Categories do indeed overlap and it would rather be narrow-minded and short-sighted to decide that e.g. the speech act of ridiculing (or the

‘ridicule other’ strategy) excludes the speech acts of criticising or downgrading (or strategies called ‘criticise other’ or ‘downgrade other’ respectively). As Schiffrin (1994: 85) states later on, utterances may carry multiple speech acts because the underlying conditions for those speech acts are interconnected, so the "one form for one function" approach might well be replaced with "one form for many functions" or "many forms for one function."

Elsewhere, the author highlights the link between speech act theory and discourse analysis:

"speech act theory offers an approach to discourse analysis in which what is said is chunked (or segmented) into units that have communicative functions that can be identified or labelled. Although we can describe such acts in different ways (e.g. as realizations of constitutive rules, as the product of form-function relations, as the outcome of different textual and contextual conditions), the import of such acts for discourse is that they both initiate and respond to other acts. Acts specify (to a certain degree) what kind of response is expected: they create options for a next utterance each time they are performed, and thus provide a local, sequentially emergent basis for discourse. Since an utterance can also perform more than one act at a time, a single utterance creates different response options for a next utterance. (...) Mappings between one form and multiple functions thus gives our exchanges a certain degree of flexibility: if we don’t respond to one possible speech act interpretation of what someone has said to us, we may respond to another (...) a single sequence of utterances may actually be the outcome of a fairly wide range of different underlying functional relationships" (Schiffrin 1994: 90-91).

I support this point of view, because it is helpful in securing a place for my data within discourse analysis and justifies its status as a piece of discourse.

In her discussion of conversational exercitives, McGowan (2004) also states that it is possible to ascribe more than one illocutionary force to one utterance and clarifies the mechanism behind indirect speech acts:

"The canonical account of indirect speech acts (…) maintains that such utterances have multiple forces. Saying, for example, “Can you pass the salt?” during a meal is, on this account, both literally a question about the addressee’s abilities and an indirect request that the addressee pass the salt. If, however, one is especially wary of multiple forces, there are a variety of ways to avoid a commitment to them (2004: 102)."

Lindblom (2001: 1605) predicts three ways of looking at discourse itself: as ‘utterance,’

as ‘social interaction’ and finally as ‘social context.’ In doing so, he adapts the classification proposed in Young et al. (1970), who in turn describes three possible ways of viewing an experience: as a particle, a wave or a field. Taking Lindblom’s understanding of discourse, we would probably have to categorize my data into the ‘discourse as social interaction’

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view. In this category, Lindblom also enumerates: politeness theories, feminist works, question processing, studies in rhetoric and composition that build upon Grice’s Cooperative Principle. Furthermore, he notes that "the "nuclear unit" for those interested in discourse as social interaction appears to be the exchange. These scholars do not consider whether the speaker’s intention is more noteworthy than the meaning of the words themselves, but consider the language as it moves between the speaker and the hearer" (ibid.). In this explanation, he mentions politeness theories only, yet I see no problem in impoliteness theories being accommodated in that category as well. What is more, the exchange (or basic unit) is the very core of my analysis, and Lindblom’s findings seem to be compatible with my data. However, his claims about intention do not really agree with my reading of impoliteness on the basis of the data analysis. In fact, I believe that intention and then its recognition are quite indispensable here for the reader to correctly interpret this sort of impoliteness.

3.4. Spoken versus written discourse

Many scholars introduce a distinction between spoken vs. written discourse, for instance Brown and Yule (1983: 4-10), Cook (1989). Some authors, nevertheless, are of the opinion that this distinction is not as clear cut as it seems and propose viewing it as a continuum (Biber 1988, McCarthy 2001, Paltridge 2006). In my opinion, my data could be situated somewhere in between. At first glance, it would appear that it belongs to written discourse, since it is situated in the internet context. However, the comments very often have a special ‘spoken’ quality and a sense of urgency about them, because their authors are often emotionally involved in the conflict and very spontaneous in publishing their feedback. It might seem that this acting impulsively is responsible for a special "write first, think later"

attitude, though this of course is purely conjecture and cannot be measured and evaluated in an academic fashion.

This spoken character of the activity is further emphasized by multiple exclamation marks in some comments (e.g. I/1, XIV/1b, XXV/3) and emoticons, in examples such as XXVIII/6, which uses a ‘sad face’ emoticon to manifest unhappiness with the transaction, or more interestingly, XXVIII/7, in which a ‘smiley’ reflects the client’s sarcasm. Another instance is the use of block capitals throughout the comment or in some of its words, which is the equivalent of screaming at the opponent and stands in oppostiton to netiquette (cf. the next section).