Teaching Performative Verbs and Nouns in EU Maritime Regulations

Abstract

This paper is concerned with performative speech acts in European Union fisheries legislation with a view to relating the semantic analysis of directive and expressive speech act verbs to politeness strategies for the management of positive and negative face. The performative verbs used in directive and expressive speech acts belong to the semantic domain of communication verbs. The directive verbs occurring in the material are: appeal, authorize, call upon, conclude, invite, promise, request, urge and warn while the expressive verbs are: congratulate, express (gratitude), pay (tribute) and thank. The semantic analysis of directive verbs draws on Leech's framework for illocutionary verbs analysis (Leech, 1983: 218). The analysis suggests that the choice of directive and expressive speech act verbs and their co-occurrence with particular addressees are motivated by the socio-pragmatic situation. 30 Naval Engineering students from the UPM also learned how these speech act verbs are used in context in the subject English for Professional and Academic Communication (2011-2012).