SOME REMARKS ON CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN ILLOCUTIONS

This short article makes some general remarks on cross-cultural differences in the use of illocutions in English and Albanian. The first part discusses theoretical issues concerning language and culture as well as their interrelation and interdependence. They are both seen as sorts of normative behavior in the realm of performing speech acts. The second part focuses on the contrastive analysis of illocutions and intends to highlight some important cultural aspects in them. Searle's (1975) taxonomy of illocutions (representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations) has been adopted for this analysis. The discussion is concentrated on issues related to collectivity and individuality in representatives, direct and indirect strategies in directives, indirect refusals in commissives, psychological states in expressives and institutional nature of illocutions in declarations.