earticle

영어

This paper analyzes three participants’ spoken discourse to research a certain minor group. In doing this, their speech acts are examined on the basis of theory. The spoken discourse is composed of conversational narrative about the school punishment of Korean children. The analyses by the speech act theory suggests that narrative communication style has various discourse markers and structural functions between its propositional meaning and illocutionary force as shown in Austin’s (1962), Labov’s (1972b) and Searle’s (1969, 1989) arguments, showing the speakers’ directive (e.g. request) and representative (e.g. claim or report), as well as contextualization cue (shared knowledge) within the participants’ speech behavior by the argument of Gumperz (1982a). Brown & Levinson’s (1987) or Scollon & Scollon’s (1995) politeness strategies of face values were represented in participants’ solidarity relationship within the minor group during the speakers’ contribution to conversation. The data analyzed by speech act theory helped to explore both pragmatic and linguistic approaches to the oral narrative discourse. The study reveals that the application of speech act theory helps pursue social meaning, norms and reality from a language performance with propositional i.e. locutionary meaning on the basis of sociolinguistics (i.e. speech act theory).