8.0 Introduction

So far we have not exploited to any significant degree the ter­minological distinction between 'sentence' and 'utterance' that was introduced in Chapter 1. Nor have we exploited the asso­ciated distinctions between Saussure's 'langue' and 'parole' and Chomsky's 'competence' and 'performance', which, as we saw in Chapter 1, need to be reformulated, as non-equivalent •dichotomies within the system—process—product trichotomy, if we are to avoid the confusion that exists in the account that is given of these technical distinctions in most textbooks.

Much of the work that has been done in formal semantics (in so far as it has been applied to the analysis of natural languages) has been based on the view that languages are sets of sentences and that sentences are used primarily, if not exclusively, to make descriptive statements. Typically, therefore, no distinction is drawn in formal semantics between sentence-meaning and prepositional (i.e., descriptive) content. This is clearly a very limited view of what a language is and (as we saw in Chapter 6) of sentence-meaning. It is a view that has been much criticized.

One of the most influential critics in recent years was the Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin (1911-60), whose ideas have been much discussed, not only by philosophers, but also by lin­guists (and representatives of many other disciplines). In this chapter, we use Austin's theory of so-called speech acts as a

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8.1 Utterances 235

departure-point for the analysis of utterance-meaning that fol­lows in Chapters 9 and 10.

8.1 Utterances

The term 'utterance', as was pointed out in Chapter 1, is ambig­uous as between a process-sense and a product-sense (1.6). ('Pro­cess' is here being used as a term which is broader than 'action' or 'activity': an action is a process controlled by an agent; an act is a unit of action or activity.) The term 'utterance' can be used to refer either to the process (or activity) of uttering or to the products of that process (or activity). Utterances in the first of these two senses are commonly referred to nowadays as speech acts; utterances in the second sense may be referred to - in a specialized sense of the term - as inscriptions. (The term 'inscription', which was introduced in Chapter 1, is not widely used by linguists. It must not be interpreted as being more appropriate to the written than it is to the spoken lan­guage.) It is one of my principal aims in this chapter to clarify the relation between speech acts and inscriptions and, in doing so, to develop in more detail the distinction between sentence- meaning and utterance-meaning. I will operate, as far as possi­ble, with the terms and concepts which derive from the work of J. L. Austin and are now widely employed in linguistics and related disciplines. But I shall need to add one or two distinctions of my own, in order to make more precise than Austin and his followers have done the rather complex relation that holds between speech acts and sentences. I will also introduce into the discussion points which are given less emphasis in what may be referred to as the Anglo-American tradition than they are in the typically French tradition which stems from the work of Emile Benveniste (1966, 1974).

The term 'speech act' is somewhat misleading. First of all, it might seem to be synonymous with 'act of utterance', rather than to denote - as it does (in the sense in which it tends to be used by linguists) - some particular part of the production of utterances. Second, it throws too much emphasis on that part of the production of utterances which results in their inscription in

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the physical medium of sound. However, since 'speech act' is now widely employed, in linguistics and philosophy, in the tech­nical sense that Austin and more particularly J. R. Searle (1969) gave to it, I will make no attempt to replace it with another more appropriate term. It must he emphasized, how­ever, that (i) 'speech act' is being used throughout in a highly specialized sense and (ii) like 'utterance', on the one hand, and 'inscription' or 'text', on the other, is intended to cover the pro­duction of both written and spoken language. Everything that is said in this chapter (and throughout this book) is intended to be consistent with what was said in Chapter 1 about competence and performance, on the one hand, and about the language-system, the use of the language-system, and the products of the use of the language-system, on the other, and to be neutral with respect to a number of differences which divide one school of linguistics from another at the present time. For example, it is neutral between generativist and non-generativist approaches to the analysis of language and languages, between cognitivism and anti-cognitivism, between functionalism and anti-functionalism, and between formalism and anti-formalism. More positively, my presentation of what has come to be called the theory of speech acts is intended to give more of the relevant philosophical background than is usually given in textbook accounts for linguists.

Austin himself never presented a fully developed theory of speech acts. The nearest he came to doing so was in the William James lectures, which were delivered at Harvard in 1955 and published, after his death, as How to Do Things With Words (1962). He had been lecturing on the same topic for some years previously in Oxford and had delivered papers relating to it as early as 1940, but did not leave behind him a fully revised and publishable manuscript of his William James lectures. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that there is no agreed and defini­tive version of his theory of speech acts. Indeed, it is not clear that Austin was even trying to construct a theory of speech acts, in the sense in which the term 'theory' is interpreted by many of those who have taken up his ideas. He belonged to the so-called ordinary-language school of philosophy, whose members tended

8.1 Utterances 237

to be suspicious of formalization and the drawing of sharp dis­tinctions.

Austin's main purpose, originally at least, was to challenge what he regarded as the descriptive fallacy: the view that the only philosophically interesting function of language was that of making true or false statements. More specifically, he was attacking the verificationist thesis, associated with logical posi­tivism: the thesis that sentences are meaningful only if they express verifiable, or falsifiable, propositions. We have already looked at verificationism in connexion with the notion of truth-conditionality (see 5.4). As we have seen, when Austin first con­cerned himself with the question, the verificationists had already had to face the objection that their criterion of meaningfulness had the effect of ruling out, not only the so-called pseudo-statements of theology and metaphysics, but also those of ethics and aesthetics. One response to this objection, it will be recalled, was to concede that sentences such as

(l)'Cannibalism is wrong' or

(2) 'Monet is a better painter than Manet'

cannot be used to make descriptive statements, but only emo­tively: i.e., to express one's feelings (see 5.5).

Another was to say that, although such sentences can be used to make true or false statements, what speakers are describing when they make such statements are their own or someone else's attitudes, rather than objective reality. \Vhat Austin did in his relatively early papers was to criticize the second of these alter­natives. He subsequently pointed out that many more of our everyday utterances are pseudo-statements than either the veri­ficationists or their opponents had realized. For example, according to Austin, if one utters the sentence

(3) 'I promise to pay you ₤5',

with the purpose of making a promise (and of communicating to one's addressee the fact that one is making a promise), one is

238 Speech acts and illocutionary force

not saying something, true or false, about one's state of mind, but committing oneself to a particular course of action.

This, in brief, is the philosophical context in which Austin first put forward his now famous distinction between constative and performative utterances. A constative utterance is, by definition, a statement-making utterance. (Austin prefers 'con­stative' to 'descriptive', because, in his view, not all true or false statements are descriptions. For simplicity of exposition in the present context, the two terms may be treated as equivalent.) Performative utterances, in contrast, are those in the production of which the speaker, or writer, performs an act of doing rather than saying.

This distinction between saying and doing (reflected in the title of Austin's Oxford lectures, 'Words and deeds') was even­tually abandoned. However, the distinction between constative and non-constative utterances, as such, was not abandoned. It is simply that, in the latest version that we have of Austin's own work, constative utterances are presented as just one class of per­formatives. Similarly, saying - in the statement-making, or assertive, sense of the verb 'say': the sense in which one says that something is or is not the case — is seen as a particular kind of doing. And, as we shall see, Austin goes into the question of say­ing and doing in considerable detail. In fact, this is what Austin's theory of speech acts, in so far as it is a theory, is all about. It is a theory of pragmatics (in the etymological sense of 'prag­matics': "the study of action, or doing").

Moreover (although Austin did not develop the implications of this viewpoint), it is a theory of social pragmatics: a theory of saying as doing within the framework of social institutions and conventionr, taken for granted and accepted by the doers (or actors). This aspect of Austin's theory has not always been given the emphasis that it deserves. ,

A second distinction which Austin draws is between explicit and primary performatives. This distinction applies, in prin­ciple, to both constative and non-constative utterances. For the present, it suffices to say that an explicit performative is one in which the utterance-inscription contains an expression which; denotes or otherwise makes explicit the kind of act that is being

8.1 Utterances 239

performed. This definition will need to be refined in several respects. As it stands, it is perhaps broader than Austin intended, and yet narrower than it ought to be. But it certainly covers all the examples that Austin and his followers have used to illustrate the class of explicit performatives. In particular, it covers non-constative utterances of sentences such as (3). Such sentences contain a so-called performative verb, and it is the occurrence of this verb, 'promise', together with the fact that it has a first-person subject and is in the simple present indicative form, which makes explicit the nature of the speech act that is being performed when the sentence is uttered in order to make a promise.

Of course, one can make a promise without doing so by utter­ing an explicit performative. For example, one can make a promise by uttering the sentence

(4) 'I will pay you ₤5'.

In this case, one will have produced what Austin refers to as a primary (i.e., non-explicit) performative. This is non-explicit, in terms of the definition given above, in that there is no expres­sion in the utterance-inscription itself (I'll pay you ₤5} which makes explicit the fact that it is to be taken as a promise rather than a prediction or a statement.

This will serve as a sufficient, though informal and rather imprecise, account of what Austin had in mind when he drew his distinction between explicit and primary performatives. It will be noted that it is utterances, not sentences, that are classi­fied as being constative or non-constative, and as being either explicitly performative or not. When linguists use the term 'per­formative sentence' they are usually referring to sentences such as 'I promise to pay you Ј5', which contain a so-called perfor­mative verb and are commonly uttered as explicitly non- constative utterances.

As will be clear from what was said about declarative and non-declarative sentences in Chapter 6, example (4) is a declarative sentence because it belongs to a class of sentences typical members of which are used characteristically to make statements. It was emphasized at that point that this does

240 Speech acts and illocutionary force

not imply that each member or any particular subclass of that class is used normally or even commonly for that purpose. Even if (3) were never used for making statements, but only for mak­ing promises, it would still be a declarative sentence by virtue of its grammatical structure. And (3) can, of course, be used (in contemporary Standard English) for making statements of var­ious kinds. There should be no need to labour this point here. But it must be borne in mind throughout this chapter.

In what follows I will make use of several of Austin's terms. But I will not always give to them exactly the same interpreta­tion as he gave them. In some instances, Austin's own interpreta­tion is far from clear; in others, it is clear enough, but controversial. There is the further problem that Austin's view of the distinction between sentences and utterances was very dif­ferent from the one that I have adopted in this book. I will there­fore reinterpret Austin's theory of speech acts in the light of this distinction.