62 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
indirect means of achieving the speaker’s ends. Here the speaker desires
warmth; the direct means of achieving this end is to turn on the heater
him/herself. As the indirect and direct speech acts are both indirect means
of achieving warmth they generate the same contextualized implicature
that the speaker wishes the heater turned on. The indirect speech act, It’s cold
in here, does not instantiate two separate speech acts: one of which is the
indirect means of performing the other. Like Searle, Leech does not pro-
pose a mechanism explaining how implicatures are generated^14 but again
the notion of cognitive environments fi lls the gap.
In any case, regardless of whether the rule governed approach of Austin/
Searle or the functional approach of Leech is preferred, both approaches
provide strong support for Brazil’s premise that language is purposeful
behaviour which speakers use in the management of their daily affairs.
3.3.1 The role of intonation in signalling the illocutionary force
of discourse
Searle has not attempted to investigate links between intonation and
illocutionary force although other scholars have. Gunter (1972) describes
intonation as signalling the relevance of an utterance to its context.
Example (9) from Gunter (1972: 205) demonstrates:
(9) Context: John drank tea^15
Response: 3 TEA 1↓ (Fall) Relevance Recapitulation
1 TEA 1 ↑ (Low-rise) Relevance Unknown
3 WINE 1↓ (Fall) Relevance Contradiction
1 WINE 1↑ (Low-rise) Relevance UnknownAs Gunter only provides constructed data, comprising sentence minimum
pairs, it is diffi cult to evaluate his claims, but his point that intonation signals
how the speaker intends the hearer to perceive the utterance is well taken.
Couper-Kuhlen (1986: 164) labels the view that a given intonation only
occurs with a particular illocution ‘the strong version of the one-to-one
hypothesis’ and the view that a given intonation marking is possible when a
particular illocution is present regardless of whether the intonation is present
elsewhere or not ‘the weak version of the one-to-one hypothesis’. Liberman
and Sag (1974: 419) provide the following example of the contradiction contour
which exemplifi es the strong version of the one-to-one hypothesis.
(10) Elephan\tiasis isn’t in/curable