Practical Class 4

“Speech acts”

Plan:

• the essense of speech acts;

• history of speech act theory;

• indirect speech acts;

• illocutionary acts;

• speech acts in computer science.

Key words:

Speech act, illocutionary act, agent language, perlocutionary act, indirect speech act.

Objectives:

The main objective is to discover the main three types of speech acts, their characteristics as well as an insight into speech act theory history. It will be important to understand the difficulties connected with indirect speech acts and their analysis. This lecture will also look at the use of speech act theory in the creation of artificial computer languages.

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“Speech acts”

The essence of speech acts

The speech act is a concept in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It can be described as "in saying something, we do something", such as when a minister says, "I now pronounce you husband and wife", or an action performed by means of language, such as describing something ("It is snowing"), asking a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request or giving an order ("Could you pass the salt?", "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back"). Other common examples of speech acts include greeting, apologizing or insulting.

Examples:

"watch out, the ground is slippery" → warning

"I will try my best to be at home for dinner" → promising

"Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?" → requesting

"Can you race with me to that building over there?" → challenging

TASK: can describing something be considered an action as well as a speech act?

History of speech act theory

For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. The acclaimed work of J. L. Austin led philosophers to pay more attention to the way in which language is used in everyday activities. His student John Searle further developed this approach. Some earlier treatments may be found in the works of some church fathers and scholastic philosophers, in the context of sacramental theology, as well as Thomas Reid, and C. S. Peirce. Adolf Reinach has been credited with a fairly comprehensive account of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long before Austin and Searle. His work had little influence, however, perhaps due to his untimely death.

Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that of performatives, which are expressions such as "I nominate John to be President", "I sentence you to ten years imprisonment", or "I promise to pay you back." In these expressions, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the sentence itself; the speech is the act it effects (unlike in so-called 'constantives' that only carry a piece of information). In contrast, perlocutionary speech acts cause actions that are not the same as the speech.

The study of speech acts forms part of pragmatics, an area of linguistics.

In philosophy, especially in ethics and philosophy of law, speech act theory is related to the study of norms.

TASK:

1. What was the primary view of language considered by linguists?

2. What was the purpose of introduction of ‘constantives’?