7.2 Philosophical approaches

spirit to an anthropological program for the study of language as social action and for this reason I will return to them later in this chapter.

7.2.1From Austin to Searle: speech acts as units of action

In the 1940s Austin argued that philosophers’ obsession with truth and truth values was due to the limited set of linguistic expressions used as data for the analysis of meaning. Sentences (1)–(3) are good examples of such expressions. They are all instances of what philosophers call assertions (and grammarians call declarative sentences9).

(1)All men are mortal

(2)The snow is white

(3)The king of France is bald

Austin pointed out that there are many other uses of language besides assertions.10 Like Malinowski, he argued that language is not just used to describe particular states of affairs (e.g. the snow is white) but to do things, that is, to perform some action:

Suppose, for example, that in the course of a marriage ceremony I say, as people will, “I do” – (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife). Or again, suppose that I tread on your toe and say “I apologize.” Or again, suppose that I have the bottle of champagne in my hand and say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” Or suppose I say “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.” In all these cases it would be absurd to regard the thing that I say as a report of the performance of the action which is undoubtedly done – the action of betting, or christening, or apologizing. We should say rather that, in saying what I do, I actually perform that action. When I say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening; and when I say “I do” (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it. (Austin [1956] 1970: 235)

9 See footnote 15 on the meaning of “declarative” for grammarians.

10The idea of different “uses” or “functions” of linguistic expressions was quite popular in European circles in the 1930s and 1940s. As discussed in chapter 9, Jakobson’s model of speech event with his six functions of language, for instance, draws heavily from Karl Bühler’s theoretical work, which starts from assumptions such as the following: “Though we do not dispute the dominance of the representational [read ‘referentialdenotative’] function of language, what now follows is suited and intended to delimit it. The concept ‘things’ or the more adequate conceptual pair ‘objects and states of affairs’ does not capture everything for which the sound is a mediating phenomenon, a mediator between the speaker and the hearer” (Bühler [1934] 1990: 37).

219

Speaking as social action

Austin presented an analytical apparatus to talk about how utterances become social acts. His units of analysis reflected an interest in moving beyond grammatical and logical levels of analysis without completely losing track of them.

He distinguished three types of acts that we simultaneously perform when we speak:

1.A locutionary act: the act of saying something, that is, the act of uttering sequences of sounds that can be interpreted according to grammatical conventions and (sometimes) assigned truth values, e.g. you’re fired, I’ll pay you back next week, what time is it?

2.An illocutionary act: the act the speaker can accomplish in saying something by means of the conventional force of the locutionary act. Thus, you're fired may be used in our society to change someone’s status from “employed” to “unemployed” (when uttered under the appropriate circumstances); the locution I'll pay you back next week may be used to commit oneself to a future action; the locution, in the form of a question, what time is it? can be used as a request for information (tell the time).

3.A perlocutionary act: the act produced by the uttering of a particular locution, that is, the consequences or effects of such locution regardless of its conventional force. These acts may or may not coincide with the goal of the illocutionary act. For instance, you’re fired, pronounced by the right person (e.g. an employer) to the right person (e.g. an employee) under the appropriate circumstances (e.g. they are not both drunk) should produce the effect that the addressee loses his job. But it may also have the effect that the addressee becomes depressed and suicidal or conversely feels liberated (e.g. he no longer needs to resign from the job he hates). In either case, these consequences are not part of the conventional force of the illocutionary act expressed by the locution

you’re fired.

Austin restricted the use of the term meaning to the locutionary act and introduced the term force for the illocutionary act and the term effect for the perlocutionary act. The locutionary act is the level at which the propositional content of an utterance is established through the conventions of grammar and lexicon. These conventions are studied by linguists in terms of grammatical units and by logicians in terms of truth values (Allwood et al. 1977). The illocutionary act is realized on the basis of the conventional goals of an utterance (what a given utterance is supposed to get done) and the contextual conditions under which it is produced. The perlocutionary act consists of actions that might be beyond the conventional interpretation of an utterance and/or outside the control of the speaker.

Austin’s distinction between meaning and force is what makes his approach new and at the same time connects it to previous traditions of linguistic study.

220

7.2 Philosophical approaches

This distinction sanctions the notion of language as action and captures the fact that the same sequence of words can perform quite different kinds of acts (in each case, having a different force) and also recognizes that there is something constant (“meaning”) across different uses of the same utterance and that therefore linguistic and logical studies of language still have something important to contribute.

Consider as an example the sentence in (4)

(4) Tom is drinking coffee

This is a grammatical English sentence that describes a situation in which someone named “Tom” is engaged in the activity of drinking coffee. The type of grammatical structure (a transitive clause in the present progressive) or the truth value of this proposition (whether or not it matches a particular state of affairs) remain the same regardless of the context of the use of this utterance by the speaker. For instance, it can be used to inform someone of what Tom is doing (the recipient of this utterance might have asked what the other people in the house are up to) or to warn someone (the recipient might have assumed that Tom was getting ready to go out). Austin would say that in these two cases the meaning of (4) stays constant, but its force changes.

As example (4) makes clear, the illocutionary act performed by an utterance is not always obvious from the surface form of an utterance – especially if we rely exclusively on lexical and syntactic information and ignore intonation and paralinguistic features (quality of voice, volume, etc.). To clarify the force of an utterance, it is useful to think of declarative sentences like (4) above as embedded in a higher clause with a verb that defines the force of the utterance. Thus, the two mentioned interpretations of (4) can be paraphrased as:

Austin called verbs such as inform and warn performative verbs because they make explicit the action performed by the embedded (typically following) sentence. There are many other verbs of this sort in English as well as in all other known languages. When we say I apologize, I assume, I promise, or I am ordering you to do this the verb we are using in the first person singular and with the present tense expresses the very act we are performing. Other examples of such verbs in English include: state, argue, conclude, admit, salute, greet, approve, criticize, assert, deny, assume, suppose, demand, approve. When we use one of these verbs in the first person singular and in the present tense, assuming that various contextual conditions hold (see below), we are performing the very action that the verb is supposed to describe (see also Searle 1969: 23).

221

Speaking as social action

However, doing something through words (the performance of an illocutionary act) is not restricted to the use of these verbs. We do not need to hear performative verbs to realize that what is being said counts as action. Instead, every time we perform a locutionary act we also perform an illocutionary act (Austin 1961: 98). In speaking we do not just establish meaningful sequences of sounds to be judged only in terms of grammaticalness and truth values. Rather, in saying something, we are always doing something. This is true not only of such obvious cases as commands, warnings, promises, and threats, but of assertions as well. Even the simple act of stating something about ourselves or others is a social act, it is the act of informing (this means that assertions are in principle no different from other kinds of speech acts11). To understand this point, we must realize that any act of speaking (and more generally of communicating) takes place within a particular context and is evaluated with respect to such a context. Austin’s concern with context goes beyond the idea that context is important for assessing the truth of a statement (Austin 1961: 144). He also wants us to recognize that in using speech, people do not just try to match the world with appropriate descriptions, they also use words to make the world conform to their wishes or needs. Searle (1976) expanded on this point by making a distinction between cases in which language must “fit the world” (i.e. provide an adequate description of an independent state of affairs, e.g. the tank is full) and cases in which the world must “fit the language” (i.e. match the state of affairs described by language, e.g. fill up the tank).

Once we realize that describing the world is only one of the many things we do with language, a question naturally comes to mind: is there a limit to the kinds of things we do with language? The answer is not obvious. Wittgenstein, for instance, believed that one could not determine once and for all the number of uses of language:

But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? – There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols,” “words,” “sentences.” And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (Wittgenstein 1958: 11)

Austin, on the other hand, was inclined to think the opposite, namely, that the number of illocutionary acts is finite. His presupposition is very much tied to his view that a science of language as social action should follow the rules and methods of other sciences:

11Austin (1962) starts out by setting up a false dichotomy between constative and performative utterances. By the end of the book he has shown that all utterances are performative.

222

7.2 Philosophical approaches

Certainly there are a great many uses of language. It’s rather a pity that people are apt to invoke a new use of language whenever they feel so inclined, to help them out of this, that, or the other wellknown philosophical tangle; we need more of a framework in which to discuss these uses of language; and also I think we should not despair too easily and talk, as people are apt to do, about the infinite uses of language. Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time. This, after all, is no larger than the number of species of beetle that entomologists have taken the pains to list.

(Austin 1970: 234)

As is typical in science, the first step in creating order out of the potential chaos of complex lists is the establishment of a typology. A potentially infinite set of phenomena is reorganized into a limited set of types. Austin (1962) presents five basic types of illocutionary acts, which have since been redefined by Searle (1976) and Searle and Vanderveken (1985).

According to Searle, in using language, we can do five things: (i) tell people how things are (assertives12), (ii) try to get them to do things (directives), (iii) express our feelings and attitudes expressives), (iv) bring about changes through our utterances (declaratives); (v) commit ourselves to some future actions (commissives). It is also possible to do more than one of these things at the same time. Although these speech acts are abstract notions and do not necessarily or uniquely correspond to particular English verbs, Searle (like Austin before him) lists a number of English verbs as examples of the different types of speech acts (adapted from Searle and Vanderveken 1985):

(i)Assertives: assert, claim, affirm, state, deny, disclaim, assure, argue, rebut inform, notify, remind, object, predict, report, retrodict, suggest, insist, conjecture, hypothesize, guess, swear, accuse, blame, criticize, praise, complain, boast, lament.

(ii)Directives: direct, request, ask, urge, tell, require, demand, command, order, forbid, prohibit, enjoin, permit, suggest, insist, warn, advise, recommend, beg, supplicate, entreat, beseech, implore, pray.

(iii)Expressives: apologize, thank, condole, congratulate, complain, lament, protest, deplore, boast, compliment, praise, welcome, greet.

(iv)Declaratives: declare, resign, adjourn, appoint, nominate, approve, confirm, disapprove, endorse, renounce, disclaim, denounce, repudiate, bless, curse, excommunicate, consecrate, christen, abbreviate, name, call.

12Searle (1976) had used the term “representatives” as the general category, but Searle and Vanderveken (1985) opted for “assertives.”

223

Speaking as social action

(v) Commissives: commit, promise, threaten, vow, pledge, swear, accept, consent, refuse, offer, bid, assure, guarantee, warrant, contract, covenant, bet.

We must remember that all of these verbs work as performative verbs only when used in the present tense and in the first person singular. Thus, the verb resign works as a declarative only if the speaker says I resign, but not if he says John resigned or resign! Of course, most of the time illocutionary acts are not expressed or introduced by performative verbs. Speakers usually do not go around saying things like I warn you, I threaten you, I command you, or I greet you. Nevertheless, hearers take (most of the time appropriately) certain utterances to be warnings, other ones as threats, or commands, or greetings.13 How does this happen? In other words, how do speakers manage to get their words to do what they want done and how do listeners manage to interpret those words in appropriate ways? As soon as we start thinking about these questions we realize that the answer required is nothing but a theory of interpretation and that these are the same kinds of questions routinely asked by ethnographers while they engage in participant-observation (see chapter 2). Can the answers given by speech act theorists be adopted by ethnographers? In what follows I will argue that although speech act theory offers some important insights into a theory of interpretation of speech as action, it does not satisfy the goals of linguistic anthropology as defined in chapter 1.

To account for how illocutionary acts do their work, Austin introduced a number of criteria, which he called felicity conditions to differentiate them from truth conditions, given that speech acts are not true or false, but, in Austin’s terms, felicitous or infelicitous (Searle later introduced the term “successful”). Thus, for a speech act to be “happily” (or successfully) performed, there are certain conditions that must be respected (from Austin 1962: 14–15):

A1. Conventionality of procedure. There must be an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, including the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.

A2. Appropriate number and types of participants and circumstances.

These first two conditions mean, for instance, that a husband saying to his wife

I divorce you in many countries would not count as a declarative speech act whereby the two of them would be from that point on considered divorced. There is usually a need for a special procedure, including the pronouncement of the speech act by a person (e.g. a judge) who has the institutional authority, in the appropriate place, to give the words the power to be effective.

B1. Complete execution of procedure.

B2. Complete participation.

13Thus, Searle (1969: 30) wrote: “Often, in actual speech situations, the context will make clear what the illocutionary force of the utterance is, without its being necessary to invoke the appropriate explicit illocutionary force indicator.”

224

7.2 Philosophical approaches

The two B conditions mean that for a speech act to be successful all required participants must correctly complete whatever task they have been assigned as part of the conventional procedure. As made clear by Austin’s own examples, these conditions introduce the important element of uptake, that is, the role of the interlocutor in making a given illocutionary act successful:

For example: my attempt to make a bet by saying “I bet sixpence” is abortive unless you say “I take you on” or words to that effect; my attempt to marry by saying “I will” is abortive if the woman says “I will not”; my attempt to challenge you is abortive if I say “I challenge you” but I fail to send round my seconds; my attempt ceremonially to open a library is abortive if I say “I open this library” but the key snaps in the lock; ... (Austin 1962: 37)

These examples also show that to assign an interpretation to a speech act, we often need to consider interactional units that go beyond the individual utterance and the individual speaker. This is the route pursued by Levinson (1983: ch. 6) who proposes to look at speech acts as part of larger sequences (see also chapter 8).

C1. Sincerity conditions. Participants must have certain thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Thus, when performing a bet speakers are expected to sincerely think that they will be willing to pay if proven wrong or when expressing condolences speakers are expected to sympathize with their addressees (Austin 1962: 40). These conditions are meant to capture the commitments and expectations produced by a speech act and hence be a measure of the responsibility implicit in the uttering of certain words under certain conditions. Austin was well aware that these conditions are difficult to evaluate in absolute terms and spent several pages discussing different situations and degrees to which one might be insincere. In Searle’s work, however, these reservations seem to vanish and sincerity and intentionality acquire a much more central role.14 As we’ll see in the next section, it is the sincerity conditions and the reliance on intentionality implicit in such conditions that have been the focus of most of the criticism of speech act theory by linguistic anthropologists.

C2. Consequent behavior. Participants must carry out whatever actions are specified or implied by the force of the speech act.

14This is not the case, however, with all speech act theorists. Bach and Harnish (1979), for instance, have revoked sincerity conditions for those acts such as apologizing, expressing condolence, greeting, and thanking, which they call acknowledgments. These are part of the category called expressives by Searle (see above): “Because acknowledgments are expected on particular occasions, they are often issued not so much to express a genuine feeling as to satisfy the social expectation that such a feeling be expressed” (Bach and Harnish 1979: 51).

225