THE USE OF COMMISSIVE SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH AND BULGARIAN AND THEIR POLITENESS IMPLICATION

Abstract

The paper focuses on one specific performative speech act and in particular on examining the grammatical, propositional and pragmatic meaning of a basic illocutionary act which belongs to the group of commissives in comparison with its Bulgarian equivalents and namely the verb agree. The article also presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a database taken from the Bulgarian media discourse and BNC /British National Corpus/ of spoken language which is also needed to identify the tendency in the use of commissive speech acts cross-culturally which can be useful to make further interpretation especially with respect to politeness implications.

Keywords

• commissive speech acts
• proposition
• pragmatic meaning
• politeness
• semantic content