21. Explain g.Searle's approach to speech acts and his classification.

Searle has introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act', which in his account is meant to be, more particularly, an indirect 'illocutionary' act. Applying a conception of such illocutionary acts according to which they are (roughly) acts of saying something with the intention of communicating with an audience, he describes indirect speech acts as follows: "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer." An account of such act, it follows, will require such things as an analysis of mutually shared background information about the conversation, as well as of rationality and linguistic conventions. In connection with indirect speech acts, Searle introduces the notions of 'primary' and 'secondary' illocutionary acts. The primary illocutionary act is the indirect one, which is not literally performed. The secondary illocutionary act is the direct one, performed in the literal utterance of the sentence. In the example: (1) Speaker X: "We should leave for the show or else we’ll be late." (2) Speaker Y: "I am not ready yet." Here the primary illocutionary act is Y's rejection of X's suggestion, and the secondary illocutionary act is Y's statement that she is not ready to leave. By dividing the illocutionary act into two subparts, Searle is able to explain that we can understand two meanings from the same utterance all the while knowing which is the correct meaning to respond to. With his doctrine of indirect speech acts Searle attempts to explain how it is possible that a speaker can say something and mean it, but additionally mean something else. This would be impossible, or at least it would be an improbable case, if in such a case the hearer had no chance of figuring out what the speaker means (over and above what she says and means). Searle's solution is that the hearer can figure out what the indirect speech act is meant to be, and he gives several hints as to how this might happen. For the previous example a condensed process might look like this: Step 1: A proposal is made by X, and Y responded by means of an illocutionary act (2). Step 2: X assumes that Y is cooperating in the conversation, being sincere, and that she has made a statement that is relevant. Step 3: The literal meaning of (2) is not relevant to the conversation. Step 4: Since X assumes that Y is cooperating; there must be another meaning to (2). Step 5: Based on mutually shared background information, X knows that they cannot leave until Y is ready. Therefore, Y has rejected X's proposition. Step 6: X knows that Y has said something in something other than the literal meaning, and the primary illocutionary act must have been the rejection of X's proposal. Searle argues that a similar process can be applied to any indirect speech act as a model to find the primary illocutionary act. His proof for this argument is made by means of a series of supposed "observations". Searle has set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts: assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition, e.g. reciting a creed directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths expressives = speech acts that express the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks declarations = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife.

Searle accepts Austin’s rejection of the constative/performative distinction as a distinction between two different types of acts. He accepts that the speech act is the basic unit of meaning and force, or the most basic linguistic entity with both a constative and a performative dimension. He also accepts that there are illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. His understanding of the latter is similar to Austin’s but his understanding of the former is quite different. Searle does not distinguish between the illocutionary act and the locutionary act but rather between the illocutionary act and both an utterance act and a propositional act. In this section I shall examine why Searle rejects the locution/illocution distinction. As pointed out in the previous section, locution and illocution cover language as meaningful and language as having conventional force. The same phonetic act under one description was meaningful, which means that it had sense and reference, and under another description had a certain conventional force, which means that it counted as a conventional social act of a certain sort (such as ordering or promising).

Although Searle accepts that the speech act is both meaningful and of some conventional force, he analyzes the dimensions of the speech act differently. The major difference is Searle’s postulating a propositional act which is subdivided into a reference act and an act of predication. Searle thus accepts the proposition which, as we have seen, Austin’s scruples prevented him from embracing. He also speaks of the (incomplete) speech act of predication which Austin did not mention. Here is an outline of the two systems:

AUSTIN	SEARLE
(a) Locutionary Act: (i) Phonetic Act, (ii) Phatic Act, (iii) Rhetic Act.	(a) Utterance Act.
	(b) Propositional Act: (i) Reference Act, (ii) Act of Predication.
(b) Illocutionary Act.	(c) Illocutionary Act.
(c) Perlocutionary Act.	(d) Perlocutionary Act.

With this outline in mind I shall now investigate Searle’s analysis of the speech act with reference to Austin’s.

The most basic act in Searle’s system is the uttering of morphemes, words and sentences [see SA, 24]. A morpheme is an element of word-form which is functional in a linguistic system. It is thus very different to Austin’s phone. It is phones combined into certain types of units that have a function in a language. Thus the utterance act does not correspond to Austin’s phonetic act and, in fact, there is nothing in Searle’s system which does. This is not to say that he rejects the idea of a phonetic act though. He recognizes it but does not include it [see ALIA, 424].

The utterance act is a speech act without a determinate meaning.[31] To perform an utterance act without performing a propositional act would be to“utter words without saying anything” [SA, 24]. It would seem then that the utterance act corresponds roughly to Austin’s phatic act which was the act of uttering the vocables, words and syntactic units of a specific language. In short, since the utterance act is the producing of morphemes, words and sentences (without regard to whether they are being used or merely mentioned) and the phatic act is the production of vocables, words and grammatical units in a specific language (again without regard to whether they are being used to say anything or are merely being mentioned), the similarity here is close enough to warrant my proceeding with the provisional understanding that Searle’s utterance act is the same as Austin’s phatic act.

Searle’s propositional act does not correspond to Austin’s rhetic act though. Both of these acts concern language use as meaningful in the sense of having definite sense and reference. Searle however allows that different utterance acts can involve the same propositional act [see SA, 24] , whereas Austin, as we have seen, denies that the different phatic acts can produce the same rhetic act. Also, whereas Austin holds that there can be a rhetic act that is not illocutionary, Searle denies that there can be a propositional act without there being an illocutionary act.[32]