[Edit] Examples

In saying "Watch out, the ground is slippery" Peter performs the speech act of warning Mary to be careful.

In saying "I will try my best to be at home for dinner" Peter performs the speech act of promising to be at home in time.

In saying "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?" Peter requests the audience to be quiet.

In saying "Can you race with me to that building over there?" Peter challenges Mary.

[Edit] History

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, particularly his "How To Do Things with Words", led philosophers to pay more attention to the non-declarative uses of language. The terminology he introduced, especially the notions "locutionary act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionary act", occupied an important role in what was then to become the "study of speech acts". All of these three acts, but especially the "illocutionary act", are nowadays commonly classified as "speech acts".

Austin was by no means the first one to deal with what one could call "speech acts" in a wider sense. Earlier treatments may be found in the works of some church fathers^{[citation needed]} and scholastic philosophers^{[citation needed]}, in the context of sacramental theology^{[citation needed]}, as well as Thomas Reid^[1], and C. S. Peirce^[2].

Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) 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 at 33 (having immediately enlisted in the German Army at the onset of war in 1914).

The term "Speech Act" had also been used already by Karl Bühler in his "Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften”, Kant-Studien 38 (1933), 43, where he discusses a Theorie der Sprechhandlungen and in his book Sprachtheorie (Jena: Fischer, 1934) where he uses "Sprechhandlung" and "Theorie der Sprechakte".

Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that performed in the utterance of what Austin calls performatives, typical instances of which are "I nominate John to be President", "I sentence you to ten years imprisonment", or "I promise to pay you back." In these typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself.

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 often treated as related to the study of norms.

[Edit] Indirect speech acts

In the course of the performance of speech acts we ordinarily communicate with each other. The content of communication may be identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be communicated, as when I request Peter to wash the dishes in saying "Peter, could you please do the dishes".

However, the meaning of the linguistic means used (if ever there are ones, for at least some so-called "speech acts" can be performed non-verbally) may also be different from the content intended to be communicated. I may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes in just saying "Peter ...!", or promise to do the dishes in saying "Me!" One common way of performing speech acts is to use an expression which indicates one speech act, and indeed to perform this act, but additionally to perform a further speech act, which is not indicated by the expression uttered. I may, for instance, request Peter to open the window in saying "Peter, will you be able to reach the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he will be able to reach the window, and at the same time requesting him to do so if he can. Since the request is performed indirectly, by means of (directly) performing a question, it counts as an indirect speech act.

Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and another replies, "I have class." The second speaker used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection.

This poses a problem for linguists because it is confusing to see (using a rather simple approach) how the person who made the proposal is able to understand that his proposal was rejected. Following substantially an account of Paul H. Grice, Searle suggests that we are able to derive meaning out of indirect speech acts by means of a cooperative process out of which we are able to derive multiple illocutions; however, the process he proposes does not seem to accurately solve the problem. Sociolinguistics has studied the social dimensions of conversations. This discipline considers the various contexts in which speech acts occur.