The Speech Act of CRITICIZING

By: Lecturer Sameerah Atshan AlFayyadh

Criticism is defined as the practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works. It is a critical article or essay; a critique. It is the investigation of the origin and history of literary documents; textual criticism (The Free Dictionary, 2016). It is the act or an instance of making an unfavorable or severe judgment, comment, etc. (Harcourt, 2016). It is the careful line –by –line examination of any written work; political, social, literal, etc. (Burton, 1970: 11). Tracy, Van Dusen and Robinson (1987: 56) define criticism as the act of ‘‘finding fault’’ which involves giving ‘‘ negative evaluation of a person or an act for which he or she is deemed responsible’’. Nguyen, (2005 :7) defines criticizing as “an illocutionary act whose illocutionary point is to give negative evaluation of the hearer’s (H) actions, choice, words, and products for which he or she may be held responsible” . Types of Criticism

Criticism is categorized into: constructive criticism and projected criticism.

• Constructive Criticism

Constructive criticism is the type of criticism that every great person seeks out. If you are trying to improve yourself, hearing how good you are at something isn’t helpful. It’s nice to hear, sure, but what the person chasing excellence wants to know is, “what could I do better?

Constructive criticism answers this question. It’s well thought out, objective, and the critic gives it with a level head. If the criticism is accurate, then it helps you improve. If the criticism is inaccurate, then you either learn what made the person see things that way, or ignore it.

• Projected Criticism

Projected criticism is an emotional, negative reaction to something you’ve said or done. If someone rants about how irresponsible you are, it’s because something you did emotionally threatened them.

Projected criticism is simply a projection of a person’s psyche. It’s the result of envy, insecurity, or anger. It should always be ignored.

SPEECH ACT OF CRITICIZING

Austin (1962) claims that an utterance encodes a specific “act” or function that the speaker wants to achieve by producing the utterance. It is indicated that the verb “criticize” denotes the speech act of criticism; an utterance encodes a specific “act” or function that the speaker wants to achieve by producing the utterance. Min (2008) indicates that, based on Austin’s analysis of speech act, the performative verb “criticize” denotes the speech act of criticism. However, the utterances were later classified according to a particular categorization as developed by Searle (1979). According to Searle, there are five types of general functions performed by speech acts:

declarations, representatives, expressives where the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state of affairs, directives and commissives. As far as criticism is concerned, it contains the types of declarations, representatives and expressives, excluding directives and commissives”( Farnia b, 2015: 305-27 ). Mey (2009: 997) states that ‘ criticize ‘ is an act that is related to verbs expressing evaluation.

Searle (1969) presents the existing ideas more systematically. He also adds the idea of ‘ indirect speech act ‘. Bach and Harnish (1979: 51) totally reject Searle’s programme and proposed a worked – out version of Strawson’s (2004) earlier, intention- centered theory. Following Strawson in the distinction between ceremonial acts like christening and marrying, where conversation is considered to be the major illocutionary mechanism, and non- ceremonial acts like; asking and stating, they are called communicative. It is an assumption that intention is vital to the accomplishment of the illocutionary act.

From:

AlMamoory, S. & AlFayyadh, S. (Criticizing in English and Arabic Tweets: A Pragmatic Contrastive Study). In (International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation), Vol. 24, Issue 08, 2020. ISSN: 1475-7192. pp. 13590- 13604).