Variatie in Speech Act Verbs in het Engels en het Frans

Abstract

Ever since the publishing of Austins paper ‘How to do things with words’ in 1962, speech act verbs have been a topic of interest to linguists. However, little research has been done in comparing French and English speech act verbs. In this paper a study has been conducted to compare the usage of speech act verbs in both the English and the French literature, the hypothesis being that French literature has a richer usage of speech act verbs when compared to the English literature. First of all, a dataset has been made of French and English speech act verbs in literature. Secondly, this dataset has been compared to the corpora British National Corpus and Frantext. The final step involved comparing these data to their respective translations. In conclusion, results have shown that there is indeed evidence which shows that French literature has a richer usage, though further research should be conducted to affirm this result.