A cognitive perspective on the indirect framing of directive constructions.
Résumé
Grammatical blending and the indirect framing of directive constructions Speakers resort to pseudo-directive constructions when attempting to get someone to do something without giving the impression of restricting the addressee's freedom of choice of action or without impinging upon the addressee's self-assessment that s/he has that freedom of choice. One efficient (i.e. face-saving) strategy consists in blending a covert coding of the speaker's authority and an overt coding of the addressee's freedom of non-compliance into the same construction. This is generally done compressively, both at the formal and conceptual levels. In XXXX (2005), we showed that the you (don't) want to/ wanna X construction (e.g. you want to make a left turn, you don't wanna miss that) displayed the main properties of a grammatical blend (Fauconnier and Turner 1996), among which the dual inheritance principle and, above all, compression (morphosyntactic and conceptual). In this case, grammatical blending successfully frames the directive as collaborative work (the speaker appears as willing to help the addressee) and thus mitigates the inherent coerciveness of the act. In this paper I will show that grammatical blending may serve the same function in expansive (pseudo-) directive strategies: (1) A- I'm going to have to ask you to leave. B- You're kicking me out? A- No, I'm not saying that. B- Ok, then I can stay? (...) A- I'm asking you to leave. B- Are you kicking me out? A- No. (2) I told you again not to take any photographs. I'm going to have to ask you to stay behind. (3) I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to check with the Defense Department. (4) Mister, you can say anything you want about me, but I'm gonna have to ask you not to talk about my horse that way. In this construction (I am going to have to ask you to X) the driving force of the illocutionary intent (Speaker wants Addressee to X > structural type: 'Speaker asks Addressee to X') is disguised as something impending (going to) and extrinsic from the speaker's own will (have to). The compositional combination of directive strategies is blended into a composite construction. However, despite its internal complexity, the expanded construction assumes some morphosyntactic and prosodic unity, insofar as each of its formal components displays a high degree of collostruction strength to the composite structure (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, 2005). This paper will show that compression - a defining property of conceptual integration (Fauconnier and Turner 2000) - does not (always) correspond in a one-to-one fashion with morphosyntactic chunking in a grammatical blend. This observation will be corroborated by empirical research on innovative directive strategies in Japanese (Smith 1992, Sunaoshi 1995, Takano 2005). Those case studies, combined with a critical examination of recent works on the topic (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Mandelblit 2000, etc.), will form the basis for a renewed (and expanded) definition of grammatical blending. Finally, these newly defined constructional integration networks will be described in light of the Fuzzy Construction Grammar framework (Desagulier 2005). REFERENCES Blum-Kulka, S. 1989. Playing it safe: The role of conventionality in indirectness. Cross- cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Edited by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 37-70 Fauconnier, G. & M. Turner. 1996. Blending as a central process of grammar. In Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Edited by Adele Goldberg. Stanford: CSLI, 113-129. ----------------. 2000. Compression and global insight. Cognitive Linguistics 11(3/4), 283-304. ----------------. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Mandelblit, N. 2000. The grammatical marking of conceptual integration: From syntax to morphology. Cognitive Linguistics 11 (3/4), 197-251. Smith, J.S. 1992. Politeness and directives in Japanese women's speech. Language in Society 21(1), 59-82. Stefanowitsch, A. & S. T. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: On the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2), 209-43. ----------------. 2005. Co-varying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1), 1-43. Sunaoshi, Y., 1995. Your boss is your "mother": Japanese women's construction of an authoritative position in the workplace. Texas Linguistic Forum, vol. 34, Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, 175-188. Takano, S. 2005. Re-examining linguistic power: strategic uses of directives by professional Japanese women in positions of authority and leadership. Journal of Pragmatics 37(5), 633-666. Desagulier, G. 2005. Grammatical blending and the conceptualization of complex cases of interpretational overlap: the case of want to/wanna. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3, 22-40.