Realisation of Indirect Speech Acts in Online Job Advertisements

The present paper aims to investigate which types of speech acts play a dominant role in the texts of online job advertisements, to what extent those acts are realised indirectly, and what purposes this indirectness may serve. The research is based on an analysis of a corpus comprising 100 online recruitment ads, of which 60 appeared in the Internet editions of three major UK newspapers, and the remaining 40 were found on two of the leading UK job portals. Methodologically the study is grounded in the cognitive approach to speech act theory, whereby the speech act taxonomy as proposed by J. Searle is treated as prototypical categorisation enhancing the organisation and systematicity of the analysis. The findings indicate that over a half of the micro-acts identified in the sample are realised indirectly. The two largest categories comprise assertions and ‘complex’/ambiguous micro-acts, both performing the functions of boasting and promising, and thus contributing to the overall persuasive appeal of recruitment ads.