The Commissives in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emma

Master’s Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, Thi-Qar University, language: English, abstract: This thesis is an attempt to study three commissive speech acts, namely offer, promise, and refusal in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emma. The study treats the problem whether the mentioned speech acts are employed directly or indirectly, which politeness strategy is mostly used to perform them, whether their grammatical structures run in parallel to those found in literature concerning them, and which one is the dominant among the three speech acts. Consequently, the study aims at investigating offer, promise, and refusal in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emma, finding the most common pragmatic strategies used to express the speech acts, finding the politeness strategies, and the type of grammatical structures used in the data, setting up the felicity conditions for the commissives in the novels, and comparing the two selected novels according to the type of speech act, grammatical structure, and politeness strategy.