Locution: The Use Of Surface Meaning In Literature

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Speech act studies present situation in which speaker encodes a message and sent to a hearer, with a certain intention, and then hearer start decoding this message to realize what is the prelocution required from him by prelocutioanry intention of the speaker. The right understanding of prelection results in felitious conditions. The target of speech act is mainly to let the hearer ends up with the original intention of the speaker; of which surface meaning wouldn't always be enough to obtain this original idea. The only case in which surface meaning would be sufficient is when locution make an exact match of illocution such as when mother tell her child "come here", it is simply understood that what is meant is an order, surly unless this …show more content…
It is widely expected that people have certain purpose from making such use in another form. This is quite manifasted in literature, such as Jane Austine, what characters in the novel say has nothing to do with what they inteded to perform by such saying and completely different from the prelocutionary force other characters do. The plot is mainly built on the wrong interpretation of locution meant by characters. Speech Act theory is build upon complicated relations; what speaker say versus what is his intention versus what hearer hears is all what speech act theory about. Likewise skillful writers and authors focus on what people want to read or hear, this require a huge skillful to know exactly how to make people do what you want while hearing and reading what they want. This is regularly occur in courts by lawyers, when they know they want to defend someone they know he should be …show more content…
The abstract meaning is surface meaning that a word or a sentence semantically carry, which can be found in dictionary. The problems of this level of language are sense, construction and reference. Semantic consider this abstract meaning as mere never-changing meaning, and that is major problem according to sense as the same word or sentence can have more than one sense. Pragmatics move step further to another level of language which can choose suitable sense of this surface meaning according to contextual meaning which is another level of language. The force that control such choice –prevousily mentioned- may relate to speech act theory. So, pragmatics is what establish the relation between abstract meaning and context in which it is used, or rather relate the literal meaning to contextual meaning with target to obtain awareness of the suitable meaning should be assigned, from the whole melicouse

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