Searle and Sinclair on communicative acts
A sketch of a research problem
John Searle and John Sinclair have worked in very different academic traditions:
analytic philosophy and empirical linguistics. Nevertheless, although they
work with very different methodological and theoretical assumptions, they both
tackle one of the deepest questions in the philosophy of language – the nature of
units of meaning – and there are similarities in their models of communicative
acts – speech acts and extended lexical units. It is therefore productive to study
in how far the two approaches are complementary, and whether their different
strengths can be combined. I will give brief examples of how Searle’s model
could be strengthened by grounding it in empirical textual and ethnographic
data, and therefore – conversely – how Sinclair’s model could be strengthened
by giving it a social rationale.
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