Coding speech acts for their degree of explicitness

Coding speech acts for their level of explicitness has been a standard procedure in speech act and politeness research for many years. Traditional coding methods, however, are problematic in two ways. Firstly, they have mostly been coded on an impressionistic basis, which can be inconsistent and unreliable. Secondly, explicitness coding has typically heavily relied on the presence and/or absence of modification devices. This raises problems in so far as modification devices are usually evaluated in addition to the level of explicitness of a speech act and both features should be evaluated independent of the other in order to avoid double-coding. The present study proposes a coding system for speech acts that functions independent of modification devices and relies on structural, syntactic and cohesive devices instead. It therefore offers a more reliable and consistent way to code the level of explicitness in speech acts.