Indirect Speech Acts Between Modern Linguistics and Arabic Linguistic Tradition

Abstract

This paper challenges the widely held belief that speech acts—particularly indirect speech acts (ISAs)—were first conceptualized by twentieth-century Western philosophers such as John Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle, and J. Sadock. It questions the assumption that the theory of ISAs originated solely in modern Western linguistics and seeks to trace its roots back to Arab and Muslim linguistic traditions.The first section provides a brief overview of ISAs in modern linguistic theory, highlighting two major explanatory approaches: the idiom/ambiguity approach (Sadock, 1974), which treats ISAs as idiomatic expressions with ambiguous literal meanings, and the inferential approach (Searle, 1975), which views ISAs as acts performed indirectly through pragmatic inference. Both approaches rest on the Literal Force Hypothesis (LFH) but differ fundamentally in interpretation. A third, more radical pragmatic view rejects LFH entirely, denying the existence of literal force and, consequently, the ISA problem itself.The second section examines the contributions of classical Arab and Muslim linguists, particularly rhetoricians and jurisprudents, to the understanding of ISAs. Using textual evidence from Arabic linguistic heritage, the author argues that these scholars demonstrated deep and early insights into indirect speech acts, comparable to—if not preceding—those found in Western theories. The analysis focuses on questions as a representative form of ISAs.