Speech act
Speech act and its constituents.
When humans speak, they pursue some goal and achieve some result. Therefore, utterances are somewhat similar to physical actions, which explains the term “speech acts”. Speech act is a communicative activity defined with regard to the intention of the speaker and the effect achieved on the listener. In this context, the act itself is called a locutionary act; the communicative intention of the act is called the illocutionary force; and the impact of the act upon the listener is called the perlocutionary effect.
The constituents of a speech act are the speaker (or writer), the listener (or reader), the message (an utterance or text), and the communicative situation (or situation of speech). These constituents relate to different branches of pragmatics (Figure 1).
Text linguistics and discourse analysis
Pragmalinguistics
Message
Locution
Pragmasemantics
SPEAKER LISTENER
Illocution CONVEYING Perlocution
THE MESSAGE
Age, status, General pragmatics Age, status,
gender, culture, etc. gender, culture, etc.
COMMUNICATIVE
SITUATION
Monocultural and cross-cultural
discourse
S ociopragmatics
Sociolinguistics
Figure 1: Speech act and branches of pragmatics
The types of speech acts are defined with regard to their illocutionary force that reflects the communicative intention of the speaker. There are different typologies of speech acts. One of the most accepted (see Grammar: Communicative Grammar) distinguishes three basic types: informative acts, obligative acts, and constitutive acts.
Informative speech acts encompass all speech acts that convey information to the listener, ask information of the listener or state that someone lacks information. The information is about what one knows, thinks, believes or feels. Informative acts are subdivided into assertive acts and information questions. Assertive acts, or representatives, depict the world as seen by the speaker. E.g. The earth is flat. They haven’t been there. I assume you are right. Information questions are inquiries about the lacking information. E.g. Where do you live?
Obligative speech acts show that the speaker imposes an obligation on somebody. In directive acts (order, command, request, proposal, advice, warning, suggestion, invitation, etc.), an obligation is imposed on the listener, e.g. Give me a cup of coffee. Make it black. Don’t touch that. Could you lend me a pen, please? Why don’t we go to the movies tonight? In the commissive acts, the speaker imposes an obligation on himself or herself. Such acts (promise, offer, threat, menace, refusal, pledge, oath, etc.) show what the speaker intends to do. E.g. I’ll be back. We will not do that.
Constitutive speech acts constitute, or create, a new social reality. Among such acts are declarative acts and expressive acts. Declarative acts change the physical world via an utterance (e.g. naming a person or thing, pronouncing somebody husband and wife, sentencing somebody to imprisonment, etc.). In order to perform a declaration appropriately, the speaker must have a special institutional role within a specific context. E.g. Referee: You are out! Jury Foreman: We find the defendant guilty. Expressive acts state what the speaker feels. They express the speaker’s psychological states (pleasure, likes, dislikes, joys, sorrow or pain). Among such acts are thanks, praises, greetings, apologies, condolences, reproaches, reprimands, etc. E.g. I am really sorry. Congratulations! It’s so nice of you! In using an expressive, the speaker attempts to change the psychological world via an utterance. The verbs used in constitutive acts, such as to name, to sentence, to pronounce, to thank, to praise, to apologize, to greet, etc., both describe a speech act and express it. Such verbs are called performatives. The utterances with them are “acts” by themselves.
Direct and indirect speech acts. A speech act is direct if it is associated with a specific syntactic structure. E.g. a declarative sentence used to make an assertion (The Earth rotates around the Sun), an interrogative sentence used to make a question (Does the Earth rotate around the Sun?) or an imperative sentence used as a command (Stand up!). A speech act is indirect if it is manifested with a syntactic structure typical of some other speech act. E.g. an interrogative or declarative sentence used as a directive (Why don’t you have lunch? or The lunch is ready). Since one and the same syntactic structure may be used to manifest various types of speech acts, it is important to have the additional clues for identifying the communicative intention of the speaker. Such clues are provided by felicity conditions. (See Aitchison, p. 95-96).
Felicity conditions, or ‘happiness’ conditions, are the appropriate circumstances under which a speech act can be recognized as intended. E.g., the sentence Our exam is in January is an assertion when said by a teacher at the beginning of the semester; the same sentence may be interpreted as a directive (warning) when pronounced by the teacher at the end of the semester. For some clear cases, the performance will be infelicitous (inappropriate) if the speaker is not a specific person in a specific context, e.g. I sentence you to six months in prison – a judge in the courtroom.