122 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
I would say he doesn’t know but he is free to exploit the illocutionary
potential of an utterance by putting on it whatever reasonable interpretation
he wishes. Once he has signalled that interpretation then the potential is
established. This, of course
means that people occasionally misunderstand each other; more often for
a variety of reasons, people exploit the ambiguity and pretend to have
misunderstood.
(ibid.:5)If this is to be realized in an analysis of the discourse we must have some
means of showing what potential has been realized. I have suggested that
we can do this at the rank of act.
An analysis of this kind faithfully reflects what is happening in the discourse.
A given utterance may be treated as a K1 or a K2 elicit. How it operates
in the discourse depends not simply on the structure of the initiation but
also on how the participants choose to regard it. An evaluate tags the opening
elicit as K1 and, if this is a common feature of the discourse, tells us a good
deal about the relationship between the participants. An acknowledge, on
the other hand, tags the opening elicit as K2, which is likely to be the norm
outside settings like the classroom and the quiz show.
The recognition of a commissive act enables us to distinguish between an
elicit and a direct in the same way. Whenever the Answering move has a
commissive as head this tells us that the Opening move has been treated as
a directive. It makes no difference what the intentions of the original speaker
were. The discourse has reached the stage where we have in play a commissive
which realizes the illocutionary potential of the preceding act as directive.
In analyses of this kind it is the patterning at the rank of act which allows
us to identify illocutionary potential.
‘Caught in the act: using the rank scale to address problems of delicacy’ is
a substantially modified version of ‘An analysis of directive exchanges’,
first published in Coulthard (1987a) Discussing Discourse, 20–43.