Prototype-based pragmatics of confessing

Abstract

This paper discusses a subtype of the speech act of confessing, namely, telling something which the speaker assumes to be unknown to the hearer and damaging to him/herself. Based on Coleman and Kay (1981), a prototype of that subtype is hypothesised and cases lacking in any of its elements are illustrated. Further, the prototypical scenario proposed in Lakoff (1987) is applied to the speech act of confessing to describe all the processes and effects of confessing. The data consist of confessional scenes played by characters in literary works either written in or translated into English.