Abstract
This study on the Speech Act of Promising builds on an article by Egner (2005) which claims that in many African Societies a promise is most often made not to be committed to its content but to be polite and save one's own or the addressee's face. While Egner opts for a Speech Act Theory approach to explain the phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that the speech act of promising may occur minus commitment, thus refuting the standard SAT claim, I have opted to treat the issue within Relevance Theory and claim that a true speech act of promising cannot be without commitment since it is a performative and institutional speech act which has to be committed by its very nature. I have rather explained that the concept PROMISE can be used as an ad hoc concept PROMISE* which conveys a speech act of "saying that" and which is a broadened version of the encoded concept to make commitment optional and include issues of politeness and face saving. While Egner claims that a committed speech act can be determined by linguistic indication most of the time I claim that the intended interpretation falls out naturally from the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure which is: "Follow the path of least effort in determining cognitive effects and stop when your expectation of relevance is fulfilled". Unlike Egner I claim that at the root of using non-committed promises as a face saving device are shame oriented cultures that need these kinds of mechanisms for politeness more than guilt oriented cultures.
About the author
Prof. Regina Blass holds an MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of London, University College since 1988. She has been working with SIL, Africa Area and International as Translator and Linguistics Consultant for 40 years. She taught Linguistics at the University of Niamey from 1995 - 1999. From 1999 to the present she has been working with Africa International University, Nairobi, as Professor, teaching MA students and supervising PhD dissertations. She is also Adjunct Faculty member of the graduate department of the University of North Dakota since 2009 where she teaches in Summer Courses MA students in Linguistics and serves on MA theses committees. Prof. Blass has published a number of articles, book chapters and the book Relevance Relations in Discourse: A Study with Special Reference to Sissala, published with Cambridge University Press (1990).
©[2012] by De Gruyter Mouton Berlin
