Clinical Pragmatics
The speech act
We communicate by producing speech acts. When we use them in certain communicative situations, we do something else than speaking: we perform an action that may be a request, a question, a promise or a threat; we give information, etc. (Austin, 1962).
John Austin (1911-1960)
- The speech act is the linguistic communication unit and represents the verbal expression of the communicative intent.
The speech act
Within the ICRA Method, the authors consider that the speech act:
- Is the verbal, grammatically complete, expression of the sender’s communicative intent, decoded by the receiver as coherent with the communicative situation.
- Is made up of paralinguistic, pre-linguistic, linguistic, nonverbal coherence and verbal coherence features, some of which are common to all speech acts and others are specific (distinctive feature).
- Marks a fundamental point for clinical speech and language work: it makes it possible to rank verbal production by its communicative weight beyond vocabulary, since what matters when a patient with communication compromises verbalizes is the impact of communicative functionality and not mere lexical production.
- If a patient makes himself/herself understood through nonverbal resources, this implies that he/she has a suitable nonverbal pragmatic development, but nonetheless faces difficulties in his/her verbal pragmatic competence (Abraham & Brenca, 2016).