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Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015) 94--99
www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Narrative illocutionary acts direct and indirect

Neal R. Norrick *
Saarland University, Campus C 5 3, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

Abstract
The pragmatics of narrative can approach functions of narrative in context from the outside in or from the inside out. In this short essay,
I will take an outside-in perspective, considering what speakers accomplish in telling stories in interaction. When we take an outside-in
approach to conversational stories, we find them functioning not just to entertain or to illustrate a point, but with illocutionary forces like
confessing and indicting, even apologizing and warning, albeit indirectly, but seemingly not with the illocutionary force of commissives or
declarations, either directly or indirectly. When the data come from natural everyday conversation, and the stories analyzed are just a few
moves long rather than the extended products of written literary fiction, it becomes natural to see stories as fulfilling (direct and indirect
illocutionary) speech act functions.
© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Narrative function; Illocutionary act; Storytelling; Indirect speech act; Outside-in

1. Introduction

A complete pragmatics of narrative must by turns adopt both an outside-in approach to functions of narrative in context,
looking at what we accomplish in telling stories, at what effects they have in speech events, and an inside-out approach,
looking at how recurrent units function within narratives. In this short essay, I will take an outside-in perspective,
considering the overall force of conversational stories, a matter which has received no systematic attention in the literature
to date, with an eye to identifying significant questions and suggesting avenues for future research.

2. Outside-in

When we take an outside-in approach to conversational stories, we find them functioning not just to entertain or to
illustrate a point, but with illocutionary forces like confessing and indicting, even apologizing and warning. Literary scholars
have integrated aspects of speech act theory into narratology, and a number of them, such as Mary Louise Pratt (1977),
Michael Kearns (1999) and Lars Bernaert (2010), have granted it a prominent and permanent position in their
narratological models: compare the more linguistic perspectives of Watts (1981) and Toolan (1998). All these sources
basically argue from the inside out that what authors, narrators and characters do with words---i.e., the illocutionary force
or point of the represented utterances---is a distinguishable and intrinsic part of the meaning of a text. That is, speech act
theory has been drawn upon to analyze the force of what narrators and characters say in individual turns/moves, based on
long fictional texts. But my rather different focus from the outside in will be upon narrative in conversation, and what a
whole story does in illocutionary terms, acting as an excuse, a warning, a confession and so on. This approach follows

* Tel.: +49 0681 302 3309; fax: +49 0681 302 4623.
E-mail address: neal@norrick.de.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.05.008
0378-2166/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 N.R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015) 94--99 95

Tsiplakou and Floros (2013) in their concern with textual (illocutionary) forces such as instructing and entertaining for
narrative texts like fables and jokes, but it goes on to consider both direct and indirect forces, extrapolating from Searle
(1975). In speech act terms, narratives count as representatives in describing events, but I will argue that they develop the
indirect forces of expressive and directive in context as well. Tsiplakou and Floros differentiate textual forces from what
they call text types like narrative, which are based on structural criteria such as discourse markers and tense. In concrete
contexts, knowledge of culturally defined genres further allows identification of narrative genres such as fable versus joke,
parody and so on. When the data come from natural everyday conversation, and the stories analyzed are just a few turns
long rather than the extended products of written literary fiction, it becomes natural to see stories as fulfilling (direct and
indirect illocutionary) speech act functions.
Consider an initial example of a story from the Saarbrücken Corpus of Spoken English (SCoSE) told as a confession
(and something more) within a circle where four participants are contributing to the overarching topic of early sexual
experience. Here Jim has already described his (innocent) relationship with the girl who lived next door to his
grandparents, when the narrative turns to focus on a specific scene relating to the theme of children’s sexual curiosity,
namely the classic scenario of ‘playing doctor’, with the twist that Jim includes his younger brother as the ‘model’ for
purposes of demonstration.

1 Jim: so we had such fun as kids.

2 and it was she,
3 and her sister,
4 to whom I was exposing my brother’s penis,
5 when my-
6 Teddy: ((laughs))
7 Vera: ((laughing)) I’m sure yeah.
8 Jim: in the famous incident,
9 when my grandmother BROKE in on us,
10 and SHAMED me for life.
11 y’know really.
12 I’ll never forget this treMENdous weight of guilt.
13 and ‘JIM what are you DOing’.
14 Teddy: ((laughs))
15 Jim: ‘COME out of there.’
16 y’know ‘GIRLS go home’.
17 and y’know.
18 Pamela: wow.
19 Jim: then I remember.
20 just sitting in the livingroom.
21 with my grandparents y’know pointedly ignoring me.
22 Vera: trying to act normally.
23 Jim: and just y’know making me feel terrible.

The initial confession already comes in lines 2--4, where Jim admits to engaging in acts within the sexual sphere in the
home of his grandparents. Even though the initial scene is tellable in its own right, it is perhaps not surprising that the
grandmother intrudes in the following scene to disrupt the (to her) abhorrent activities, and that her old-fashioned morality
prevails as she ‘shames’ the teller ‘for life’ and sends the girls home. As the story continues, the moral perspective clearly
moves from the young boy (and the teller) to the grandparents, who do not share his more realistic attitude toward
children’s curiosity about differences between girls and boys. The story works not only as a confession of early sexual
experience in keeping with the current topic of conversation, but also as an indictment of conservative attitudes regarding
children’s natural inquisitiveness about the body. Still, confessing and indicting are both specific types of representative
speech acts, not yet indirect illocutionary acts like expressives or directives distinct from representatives. Confessing is
simply a species of representative in which the speaker divulges his/her own culpable activities. For a proper indirect
speech act there must be an inference from the direct force to another type of illocutionary distinct from representative, say
expressive as in an apology. We need a pragmatic perspective on narrative to sort out these functional matters, not just in
personal contexts, but in institutional ones and in the workplace, where praise and blame, guilt and innocence bear
existential consequences.
A second sample story functions from the outside in as an excuse for failing to accomplish a piece of work. In the
excerpt from a telephone conversation below, taken from the London-Lund Corpus (8--4), Betty tells a story to explain why
she has not yet taken care of a pending task in response to a query regarding the status of the item in question.
96 N.R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015) 94--99

1 Betty: as I say I,
2 all that happened was I took it uh,
3 Ian: m.
4 Betty: um put it my usual folder.
5 and of course as I haven’t been back to work there.
6 I haven’t had it in my bag since you see.
7 it just so happened that I went on holiday,
8 and then this school has come up you see.
9 Ian: yes of course.
10 Betty: but I uh,
11 obviously y’know will index it,
12 and put it in the appropriate box.

This little story does not count as a direct apology in speech act terms, since Betty only describes the circumstances
surrounding her failure to index a file without expressing regret to her addressee: she justifies her behavior but she does
not articulate her feelings about this failure as such. In Searle’s original (1969) treatment of illocutionary acts, apologizing
qualifies as an expressive with a sincerity condition such as ‘the speaker feels sorry about some past act’, and an essential
condition that the speech act expresses this feeling. However, Betty’s story does not say anything explicit about her
feelings, though she is at pains to make her addressee appreciate the reasons for her neglect: Notice the appeal to
common ground with ‘of course’ in line 5, and the recurrence of ‘you see’ in lines 6 and 8, suggesting that Ian will
understand once he hears the reasons for the slip-up. Betty also seeks to minimize her transgression, saying from the
outset: ‘all that happened was’ in line 2: thus, she suggests that no apology should be necessary. Otherwise she simply
offers reasons for the missing file. The formula ‘it just so happened’ in line 7 serves to focus a particular circumstance
helping to explain Betty’s omission. Again the choice of ‘come up’ in line 8 suggests that ‘this school’ was somehow
unexpected. All this explanation and appeal presuppose that Betty accepts responsibility for the incident even if she
expresses no feeling of guilt as such. Thus, though it comes short of an apology in Searle’s scheme of direct expressive
illocutionary acts, Betty’s story certainly counts as an indirect apology in addressing its felicity conditions in the sense of
Searle (1975): that is, in asking questions or making statements about the preparatory, essential or sincerity conditions for
the successful and felicitous performance of an illocutionary act, in the case of an apology, for instance, saying one admits
responsibility for or feels bad about an injury to the addressee.
Narrative is the standard conversational resource for describing what happened, but not necessarily for expressing
feelings, in traditional speech act terms, so that narratives initially, from the inside out constitute representatives rather
than (direct) expressives, though they can certainly function as indirect expressives, for instance as indirect apologies
from the outside in. Moreover, narrative provides a ready forum for the teller to deliver a select set of details or even an
original interpretation of past actions: Narration is after all the natural mode for prevarication as well as for ‘factual’
description of events, so that the recipient (and analyst) of Betty’s response may have justified reasons to doubt its
complete veracity, even as Betty piles up explanations (or more culpable-sounding: ‘excuses’) for not having yet delivered
the indexed file.
For an adequate pragmatics of conversational narrative, we need an account of how stories match up with direct and
indirect illocutionary acts, which acts stories typically perform and which acts they seldom perform or perhaps cannot
perform. Initially, stories seem predestined to function directly only as representative speech acts like excuses and
admissions rather than expressive speech acts like apologies proper: we admit what we did and how it happened in
narrative form, and we adopt a particular stance toward the events described, but (seemingly) often without directly
expressing any emotional response, and often not addressed at the person who has suffered injury, and who would thus
be the proper recipient of an apology, so that our stories end up as admissions and excuses. In describing examples of
laudatory and blameworthy behavior, narratives naturally take on a hortatory tenor as well: accordingly, a story describing
an unfortunate incident can provide an indirect directive (warning, advising), perhaps with an explicit ‘moral’ tacked on as
in fables. Hence, depending on how stories are told and their contextual circumstances, they can perform a range of
functions in service of a wide set of interactional goals. Confessions recalled from childhood and the more distant past
may be related more in the spirit of humor, whereas those from recent, responsible adulthood in particular may involve
much emotion and promises to reform in the future, though they need not.
Now there is no denying that stories may function simply as representatives, indeed that there are recognized
contextual slots for stories of various types, for instance, when at bed time a child says ‘tell me a story’. We even have
specific genre labels for stories in certain slots, as in ‘tell me a fairy story’. In this context, a story is just a story, a pure
representative, concerning people and events long ago and far away. It doesn’t DO anything in the context except fill the
story slot. In everyday contexts references to and requests for stories are not uncommon. Thus, in the exchange below
 N.R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015) 94--99 97

from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, a story fills a typical story slot: it is still a function determined
by context, representative with significance for teller identity, but no additional force like confessing or making excuses.
Here three young women are talking about recent events when the term ‘quiet time’ reminds Judy of a story Ellen knows
but Ayesha does not.

1 Ellen: . . . we were all having our quiet time.

2 Judy: ((laughing)) you’ve heard my story,
3 have you heard my story?((laughing))
4 Ellen: oh no.
5 you gotta tell Ayesha that story,
6 that’s funny.
7 Ayesha: oh no.
8 Judy: did I tell you this story?
9 I was having a quiet time with Denora out on Hendry’s Beach.
10 and we were on the beach.
11 but up away from the water,
12 but on the sand.

A particular experience becomes part of a personal biography at least partially because a person formulates a story about
it and has this story ratified by friends in interaction, friends who associate a particular story with the teller and ask her to
retell it for other friends.
Further, stories are typically representative in presenting justifications and explanations in contexts like the one in the
passage below from the ‘B-K conversation’ (Craig and Tracy, 1983) where a narrative accompanies an answer to a
question:

105 K: do you ski?

106 B: no.
107 I skied once, I tried to ski.
108 I went part way down the slope,
109 and tipped over ((laughs)).
110 K: ((laughs)) that was it ((coughs)).
111 B: everybody, everybody in the whole skis- class . . .

Characteristically, the teller begins with a simple ‘no’, then offers a brief run-through of her story and waits for an initial
recipient response, before she goes on to produce an extended narrative. The story instantiates a representative speech
act of describing a past incident.
Besides rituals such as children asking for stories at bedtime, certain events call for stories and provide specific slots
for them, for instance:
The best man speech at wedding receptions characteristically contains stories, usually embarrassing to the groom;
award ceremonies often evoke stories of past successes and failures of awardees;
memorial services provide slots for stories about the deceased;
and so on.
Thus, there is no shortage of contexts where stories realize direct representative function but nevertheless from an
outside-in perspective fill a culturally defined slot, resulting in a particular identifiable pragmeme, to use a term recently
revived by Mey (2001; cf. Pike, 1954 on behavioremes; and Hymes, 1974). But our purpose here is to discuss narratives
with an indirect illocutionary function distinct from the direct representative one. We have already seen that a story may
realize expressive force as an indirect apology, and I have signaled that a story of misfortune might indirectly assume the
force of a warning, a species of directive.
Consider an example of a story of an accident told in a context where it takes on the force of an admonition, functioning,
that is, as a direct representative but an indirect directive. In this excerpt from the SCoSE Corpus, Jacob and Mark have
been discussing how dangerous rough-housing can become, when Mark recalls an accident story his aunt told him.

1 Jacob: we’ve kept everything pretty much under control,

2 [though this year.]
3 Mark: [that’s right,]
98 N.R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015) 94--99

4 you can’t wrestle around,

5 or bad things will happen.
6 Jacob: yeah, Roger got [his nose-]
7 Mark: [you know what] happened,
8 to my one of my aunt’s friends out in Iowa?
9 like when- when she was younger,
10 she had a headgear from braces,
11 and these two girls were wrestling around,
12 just playing around, wrestling.
13 and one girl pulled her headgear off her mouth,
14 and let it snap back.
15 and it slid up her face.
16 and stuck in her eyes.
17 and blinded her.
18 Jacob: wow.
19 Mark: isn’t that horrid?
20 that’s horrid.
21 Jacob: [when my-]
22 Mark: [blinded her] for life.
23 isn’t that horrid.
24 that’s just- I mean just from goofing around,
25 just from screwing-
26 a little bit of screwing around.

Before introducing his narrative, Mark has already stated its basic point, namely ‘you can’t wrestle around or bad things will
happen’ in lines 4--5, and he returns to the theme after the story in lines 24--26: ‘I mean just from goofing around, just from
screwing- a little bit of screwing around’. The narrative is also heavily and explicitly evaluated with repetitions of ‘horrid’ in
lines 19, 20 and 23. With all this discoursal support, clearly a narrative with direct representative function can assume the
force of a warning, and thus of an indirect directive.
So narratives can take on indirect expressive and directive force, but can they function as indirect commissives or
declarations, the remaining two classes of illocutionary acts according to Searle (1975)? It seems not. Commissives are
directed toward future action, while representatives describe events present or past, whereby narrative is most closely
associated with the representation of past events. We might imagine a story of a past indiscretion being interpretable as a
promise to never repeat the questionable action, but this would stretch the limits of normal inference, and such an
interpretation would certainly be defeasible for the presumed promise. I have not so far found appropriate conversational
data to test these assumptions. Declarations, too, bring about states of affairs to come, they make the world fit the words,
in Searle’s terminology, quite different from the representative function of describing the world or, again in Searle’s terms,
making the words fit the world. Since declarations generally prescribe particular formulaic wording to set some
institutionalized act in motion, it is difficult to imagine how a narrative could function in any way but to rhetorically support
such a formulaic pronouncement. This leaves us then with narratives as direct representatives with indirect forces in the
illocutionary territory of expressives such as apologies, in as much as stories can contain emotional reactions like
contrition to descriptions of past events, and in the territory of directives such as warnings, in as much as stories can
contain negative evaluations of past events. Otherwise, narratives serve as illocutionary representatives, either assigning
praise or blame to the teller’s own actions to produce acts like boasting and confessing or to some other person’s actions
to produce acts of praising or indicting. Both first person and third person narratives may work entirely as representatives
for the entertainment and/or enlightenment of listeners, though first person stories will generally involve positioning,
alignment and stance-taking on the part of the teller with consequences for identity construction. Particularly, imagined
stories about non-real persons (fiction, as when one tells a fairy tale) may remain rather free of evaluation and
ramifications for the teller’s personal identity.

3. Tentative conclusions

In this outside-in approach to narrative in conversation, I have begun to develop an account of the overall direct and
indirect illocutionary acts performed by telling stories, and to demonstrate that they generally realize directly the force of
representative acts such as confessing and making excuses, even as they indirectly perform such expressive acts as
apologizing and such directive acts as warning. Seemingly narratives cannot realize the indirect force of commissives and
declarations. Obviously more data from a range of contexts require consideration and many details need working out.
 N.R. Norrick / Journal of Pragmatics 86 (2015) 94--99 99

Acknowledgements

Maximiliane Frobenius gave me the initial idea that narratives should realize indirect as well as direct illocutionary
forces in the approach I was developing. Gerardine Pereira and Michael Haugh provided valuable input along the way.

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Neal R. Norrick held the chair of English Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany from 1997 to 2013. His research
specializations include conversation, narrative, verbal humor and formulaicity. Professor Norrick acts as Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of
Pragmatics, and he serves on the advisory boards of the journals Discourse Processes, Humor, International Review of Pragmatics, Journal of
Language Aggression and Conflict and Text & Talk. He is an elected member of the advisory board of the International Pragmatics Association.