Performatives vs. Statements

I name this ship “The Queen Elizabeth” (if uttered when smashing the bottle against the stern = the act of naming)

My daughter is called Elizabeth – no act.

Explicit performatives contain a performative verb (surrender immediately).

Implicit performatives do not contain a performative verb (how about going to NY on Saturday? The ice over there is thin.)

Later this distinction was rejected by Austin in favor of a general theory of speech acts.

In saying anything one performes some kind of act. All utterances are performative in fact. While saying something the speaker can perform speaker may performs 3 acts simultaneously:

1. A locutionary act of saying something in the full sense SAY (the production of meaningful linguistic expression)

2. An illocutionary act: saying something for attaining a certain communicative goal (the communicative force is added). The meaning of a sentence consists in its having a certain illocutionary potential (force) that is closely & conventionally associated with its form. Different locutionary acts can be used to realize the same illocutionary force (at the ticket-office: a day return ticket to Oxford. Please/can I have a day return ticket to Oxford/I’d like a day return ticket to Oxford.)

3. A perlocutionary act which means producing an impact on the hearer’s feelings, thoughts & conduct, causing a change in the mind & behavior of the listener (to bring about effects on the audience through the utterance).

What governs the linguistic realization of these speech acts?

Searle: regulative & constitutive rules.

All interaction has regulative rules which govern greetings, choice of topics, interruption & so on. These rules may vary from community to community. Constitutive rules control the ways in which an utterance of a given form realizes its illocutionary force. E.g. the constitutive rules for promising. Searle argues that we can classify the illocutionary verbs as semantic complexes. Each verb carries some additional meaning. E.g. the verbs ‘request, beg’ are concerned with the differences in the relative status of the speaker & the hearer. ‘Boast, congratulate’ – the differences in the way the utterance relates to the interests of the speaker & hearer.

The parson may object to it: the pragmatic meaning of the utterance

The parson – the definite article – it points us in the direction of a clergyman assumed to be known by the speaker & the hearer. The noun phrase takes on appointing function & as such becomes communicatively active as reference.

Illocutionary force: the speaker is talking about something, expressing a proposition by using the symbolic conventions of the code to key us to a context of shared knowledge. But the speaker is not just talking about something, but is doing so in order to perform some kind of illocution of communicative act. These pragmatic possibilities are not signaled in the language itself. They have to inferred for the context in which the utterance is made.

Perlocutionary effect: in making an utterance, the person expresses a certain intended meaning designed not just to be understood as such, but to have some kind of effect on the second person: to frighten, or persuade, or impress, or establish a sense of common purpose of shared concern.

When we talk about propositional reference, illocutionary force & perlocutionary effect, we are dealing not with the semantic meaning, as encoded in the language itself, but the pragmatic meaning which people achieve in speech acts.

Pragmatics is the study of what people mean by language when they use it in the normal context of social life.