Responding to Indirect Speech Acts in Patrick White’s Novel the Aunt’s Story

This article adopts a cognitive-linguistic perspective on communication through indirect speech acts in Patrick White’s novel, “The Aunt’s Story.” We employ the notion of indirect speech acts as a tool for analyzing listener responses in indirect communication events. The responses to indirect speech act coordinate communication, providing a conceptually unified understanding or misunderstanding of the indirect utterance. The methods applied here include targeted sampling, contextual interpretation, quantitative analysis, and descriptive methods. The objectives are as follows: 1) to investigate how listener responses to indirect speech acts differ in terms of types and functions they perform in conversation; 2) to highlight that listener responses to indirect speech acts construct and coordinate different types of communication in the speaker’s dialogues; 3) to specify the predominant type of indirect speech act communication by analyzing listener responses in Patrick White’s novel, “The Aunt’s Story.” This paper examines how listeners' responses to indirect speech acts contribute to cooperative and uncooperative communication. The study demonstrates that proper listener responses to indirect speech acts mostly lead to successful types of indirect communication in Patrick White’s novel, “The Aunt’s Story.”