Act of Locution: He said to me “Entertain her!” Act of Illocution: He urged (or advised, ordered, etc) me to entertain her. Act of Perlocution: He persuaded me to entertain her.

Task 2. Consider the Classification of Illocutionary Acts.

• Representative: I have ten fingers on both hands.

• Directive: Shut the window!

• Question: Who has won the presidential election?

• Commissive: I’ll meet you at the entrance at 2 p.m.

• Expressive: I’m sorry for calling you a fool.

• Declaration: You are out uttered by an umpire/ judge at a baseball game.

Task 3. Consider the following examples and fill in the table:

Utterance	Syntactic Form	Illocutionary Force
It’s raining.
Keep quiet.

Significant dimensions

In which illocutionary acts differ one from another.

1. Differences in the point (or purpose) of the (type of) act.

2. Differences in the direction of fit between words and the world.

3. Differences in expressed psychological states.

4. Differences in the force or strength with which the illocutionary point is presented.

5. Differences in the status or position of the speaker and hearer as these bear on the illocutionary force of the utterance.

6. Differences in the way the utterance relates to the interests of the speaker and the hearer.

7. Differences in relations to the rest of the discourse.

8. Differences in propositional content that are determined by illocutionary force indicating devices.

9. Differences between those acts that must always be speech acts, and those that can be, but need not be performed as speech acts.

10. Differences between those acts that require extra-linguistic institutions for their performance and those that do not.

11. Differences between those acts where the corresponding illocutionary verb has a performative use and those where it does not.

I2. Differences in the style of performance of the illocutionary act.

SEMINAR 2.

Speech Acts. Illocutionary Acts: Classification by Searle

Task 1. Study the basic types of illocutionary acts, paying attention to the notions of illocutionary act, illocutionary point, the direction of fit, propositional content and illocutionary force.

Theory Generalization. Classification of Speech Acts by Searle

We represent the word-to-world direction of fit with ↓, a downward arrow, the world-to-word direction of fit with ↑, an upward arrow. In formulae, B stands for believe, W for want, I for intend, etc.

Searle presents a list of what he regards as the basic categories of illocutionary acts.

Assertives / Representatives. The illocutionary point or purpose of the members of the assertive class is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something's being the case, to the truth of the expressed proposition. All of the members of the assertive class are assessable as true and false. Using Frege's assertion sign (r) to mark the illocutionary point common to all the members of this class, and the symbols introduced above, we may symbolize this class as follows:

The direction of fit is word-to-world; the psychological state expressed is Belief (that p).

Directives. The illocutionary point of these is that they are attempts (of varying degrees) by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. They may be very modest "attempts" as when I invite you to do it or suggest that you do it, or they may be very fierce attempts as when I insist that you do it. The direction of fit is world-to-words and the sincerity condition is want (or wish or desire). The propositional content is always that the hearer H does some future action A.

Verbs denoting members of this class are ask, order, command, request, beg, plead, pray, entreat, and also invite, permit, and advise. Searle thinks also that dare, defy and challenge are in this class (though Austin doesn’t list them here).

Questions are a subclass of directives, since they are attempts by S to get H to answer, i.e. to perform a speech act.

Commissives. Commissives then are those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker (again in varying degrees) to some future course of action. Using "c" for the members of this class generally, we have the following symbolism: