Grounding, semantic motivation, and conceptual interaction in indirect directive speech acts

In this paper we attempt to develop the still programmatic but insightful proposal made by Thornburg and Panther (1997) and Panther and Thornburg (1998), according to which the identification of the intended meaning (or illocutionary force) of indirect requests (and by extension of indirect speech acts in general) is based on conceptual metonymies operating on the grounds of the different components of illocutionary scenarios. We build into Panther and Thornburg's account other aspects of indirect directives which they have not considered yet. Thus we examine issues such as the semantic motivation of indirect directives, the prototypicality degrees of the constructions used to convey them, their instantiation potential, their image-schematic basis, and the cognitive motivation of some of their features in discourse. We argue that calculating the illocutionary force of an utterance is ultimately a matter of conceptual interaction between propositional, image-schematic, metonymic, and metaphorical idealized cognitive models or ICMs. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.