«Perdona / termine»: The directive speech acts in labour mediation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe from a linguistic point of view how directive speech acts are encoded in the context of labour mediation. The theoretical background takes the theory of speech acts as conceived by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969 and 1975) as a starting point. The corpus to be analysed consists of five labour mediation sessions held in Almería (Spain) between 2003 and 2006. From a qualitative perspective, the most salient feature is the high frequency of the imperative, which represents 41.9% of the directive speech acts present in the corpus. However, the use of the imperative is also significant from a qualitative point of view because the pragmatic approach shows that the context is decisive in assessing whether speech acts enhance or damage the face of the addressee, independently of the forms of address -traditionally considered polite or impolite- in a given utterance.