Blurb:

Indirect speech acts as they occur in Irish are considered in chapter 11, Indirect speech acts. An indirect speech act (ISA) is an utterance that contains the illocutionary force indicators for one kind of illocutionary act but which is uttered to perform another type of illocutionary act. A (non-exhaustive) selection of ISAs are considered: a) Question on ability à yielding a request for action X; b) Yes-no question à yielding a directive request for action X; c) Assertion with proposal à yielding a directive yes-no question; and d) Assertion à yielding a request for information. While ISAs are a puzzle consisting of two speech acts in one, they still arise from general principles of collaborative discourse under the reasonable assumption that the interlocutors are rational and cooperate with each other. A way to treat utterances whose force differs from what their force indicators (IFID) is to assume that they have both a literal force, and an indirect force that is inferred in virtue of knowledge available to the interlocutor H. Our account makes use of the notion of a mental model, represented as a conceptual graph, over which H traverses in search of a relevant meaning once the initial literal meaning of the utterance has been evaluated and found wanting in context. Along with relevance, the cognitive operations of salience, prominence, attention, and expectation, play also an important role in guiding the traversal of the conceptual graph of the situation. The situational context plays a decisive role in the interpretation of an ISA utterance.