12. Speech act sequences
1. Introduction
Written discourse or dialogical discourse types such as conversation, court trials, news interviews, political debates, classroom lectures, interactions via chat or Skype, or service encounters consist of sequences of ordered speech acts that convey communicative action and promote the negotiation of meaning in situated contexts. The term “speech act sequence” was introduced by van Dijk (1979, 1980) as an extension of speech act theory (Austin 1962, Searle 1969) to account for the coherence and function of speech act sequences in conversation. The current understanding that speech acts are multifunctional actions in communication was implicitly stated in Wittgenstein’s (1958) ...
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