2. Speech Act

Issues Discussed:

1. J. L. Austin’s taxonomy of speech acts

2. Speech act and language development

3. Earlier treatments of speech acts

4. Historical critics of speech act theory

Our initial focus will be on the traditions in pragmatics inaugurated by the J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice. Both of these philosophers were interested in the area of pragmatics we call ‘beyond saying.’ In the classic period, these phenomena were studied on the premise — a premise increasingly undermined by developments in pragmatics itself — that a fairly clear distinction could be made between what is said, the output of the realm of semantics, and what is conveyed or accomplished in particular linguistic and social context in or by saying something, the realm of pragmatics. What is said is sort of a boundary; semantics is on the near side, and those parts of pragmatics that were the focus of the classic period are on the far side.

J. L. Austin’s Taxonomy of Speech Acts

The British philosopher John Langshaw Austin (1911 – 1960) was intrigued by the way that we can use words to do different things. Whether one asserts or merely suggests, promises or merely indicates an intention, persuades or merely argues, depends not only on the literal meaning of one's words, but what one intends to do with them, and the institutional and social setting in which the linguistic activity occurs. One thing a speaker might intend to do, and be taken to do, in saying "I'll be there to pick you up at six", is to promise to pick his listener up at that time. The ability to promise and to intend to promise arguably depends on the existence of a social practice or set of conventions about what a promise is and what constitutes promising. Austin especially emphasized the importance of social fact and conventions in doing things with words, in particular with respect to the class of speech acts known as illocutionary acts.

Austin began by distinguishing between what he called ‘constatives’ and ‘performatives.’ A constative is simply saying something true or false. A performative is doing something by speaking; paradigmatically, one can get married by saying "I do" [3]. In this case we can say that many utterances (things people say) are equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I name this ship” or when a minister joints two people in marriage saying: “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. We can add many more examples:

• I nominate John to be President.

• I sentence you to ten years' imprisonment.

• I promise to pay you back.

• Sergeant Major: Squad, by the left… left turn!

• Referee: (Pointing to the centre circle) Goal!

• Groom: With this ring, I thee wed.

In these typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising, etc.) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself.

Constatives are true or false, depending on their correspondence (or not) with the facts; performatives are actions and, as such, are not true or false, but ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous,’ depending on whether or not they successfully perform the action in question. In particular, performative utterances to be felicitous must invoke an existing convention and be invoked in the right circumstances.

However, a clear delimitation between performatives and constatives proved to be difficult to establish. There are explicit performatives; a verb used in a certain way makes explicit the action being performed: "I bet that there is a dangerous animal there," "I guarantee that there is a dangerous animal there," "I warn you that there is a dangerous animal there." But the same action could be performed implicitly: "There is a dangerous animal there," where both issues of (in)felicities and issues of truth/falsity are simultaneously present. Instead of pursuing the distinction between performatives and constatives, Austin proposed a new three-fold distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts (which are other levels of description, rather than different types of speech acts) [2].

According to this trichotomy, a speech act is:

1. a locutionary act, that is, an act of saying something, the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising:

• a phonetic act: uttering certain noises;

• a phatic act: uttering words "belonging to and as belonging to, a certain vocabulary, conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar";

• a rhetic act: uttering words "with a certain more-or-less definite sense and reference" [2, p. 95],

corresponding to the following aspects of any meaningful utterance:

• verbal,

• syntactic,

• semantic

2. an illocutionary act, that is, the semantic ‘illocutionary force’ of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning (e.g. ordering, warning, assuring, betting, plighting one’s troth, welcoming, promising, bequeathing, expressing an intention, etc.)

3. a perlocutionary act, that is, certain consequential effects, whether intended or not, upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons (who, say, accept the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned) such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something [2, p. 101]. For example: "By the way, I have a CD of Madonna; would you like to borrow it?" Its illocutionary function is an offer, while its intended perlocutionary effect might be to impress the listener, or to show a friendly attitude, or to encourage an interest in a particular type of music.

As an example, consider the following: my saying to you "Don't go into the water" (a locutionary act with distinct phonetic, syntactic and semantic features) counts as warning you not to go into the water (an illocutionary act), and if you heed my warning I have thereby succeeded in persuading you not to go into the water (a perlocutionary act).

At the point of his untimely death, Austin's work on speech act theory was far from complete. His main work “How to Do Things with Words” was published posthumously, based on lecture notes of Austin and his students.