part 1- 3. Speech Acts

part 1- 3. Speech Acts, Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

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3. Speech Acts : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Reference Online
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3. Speech Acts
JERROLD
JERROLD SADOCK
SADOCK
Subject
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
Key
-Topics
Topics
speech act theory
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00005.x
When we speak we can do all sorts of things, from aspirating a consonant, to constructing a relative
clause, to insulting a guest, to starting a war. These are all, pre-theoretically, speech acts - acts done
in the process of speaking. The theory of speech acts, however, is especially concerned with those
acts that are not completely covered under one or more of the major divisions of grammar -
phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics - or under some general theory of actions.
Even in cases in which a particular speech act is not completely described in grammar, formal features
of the utterance used in carrying out the act might be quite directly tied to its accomplishment, as
when we request something by uttering an imperative sentence or greet someone by saying ÑHi!Ò
Thus, there is clearly a conventional aspect to the study of speech acts. Sometimes, however, the
achievement cannot be so directly tied to convention, as when we thank a guest by saying, ÑOh, I love
chocolates.Ò There is no convention of English to the effect that stating that one loves chocolates
counts as an act of thanking. In this case, the speaker's
INTENTION
in making the utterance and a
recognition by the addressee of that intention under the conditions of utterance clearly plays an
important role. Note that whether convention or intention seems paramount, success is not
guaranteed. The person to whom the conventionalized greeting ÑHi!Ò is addressed might not speak
English, but some other language in which the uttered syllable means ÑGo away!,Ò or the guest may
not have brought chocolates at all, but candied fruit, in which cases these attempts to extend a
greeting and give a compliment are likely to fail. On the other hand, failure, even in the face of
contextual adversity, is also not guaranteed. Thus, one may succeed in greeting a foreigner who
understands nothing of what is being said by making it clear through gesture and tone of voice that
that is the intent. Much of speech act theory is therefore devoted to striking the proper balance
between convention and intention.
Real-life acts of speech usually involve interpersonal relations of some kind: A speaker does
something with respect to an audience by saying certain words to that audience. Thus it would seem
that ethnographic studies of such relationships and the study of discourse should be central to
speech act theory, but in fact, they are not. Such studies have been carried out rather independently
of the concerns of those philosophers and linguists who have devoted their attention to speech acts.
This is perhaps not a good thing, as Croft (1994) has argued, but since it is the case, anthropological
and discourse-based approaches to speech acts will not be covered in this handbook entry.
1 Austin
The modern study of speech acts begins with Austin's (1962) engaging monograph How to Do Things
with Words, the published version of his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955. This
widely cited work starts with the observation that certain sorts of sentences, e.g., I christen this ship
the Joseph Stalin; I now pronounce you man and wife, and the like, seem designed to do something,
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here to christen and wed, respectively, rather than merely to say something. Such sentences Austin
dubbed
PERFORMATIVES
, in contrast to what he called
CONSTATIVES
, the descriptive sentences that until
Austin were the principal concern of philosophers of language - sentences that seem, pre-
theoretically, at least, to be employed mainly for saying something rather than doing something.
While the distinction between performatives and constatives is often invoked in work on the law, in
literary criticism, in political analysis, and in other areas, it is a distinction that Austin argued was not
ultimately defensible. The point of Austin's lectures was, in fact, that every normal utterance has both
a descriptive and an effective aspect: that saying something is also doing something.
1.1 Locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions
In place of the initial distinction between constatives and performatives, Austin substituted a three-
way contrast among the kinds of acts that are performed when language is put to use, namely the
distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, all of which are characteristic
of most utterances, including standard examples of both performatives and constatives.
L
OCUTIONARY
ACTS
, according to Austin, are acts of speaking, acts involved in the construction of
speech, such as uttering certain sounds or making certain marks, using particular words and using
them in conformity with the grammatical rules of a particular language and with certain senses and
certain references as determined by the rules of the language from which they are drawn.
I
LLOCUTIONARY
ACTS
, Austin's central innovation, are acts done in speaking (hence illocutionary),
including and especially that sort of act that is the apparent purpose for using a performative
sentence: christening, marrying, and so forth. Austin called attention to the fact that acts of stating or
asserting, which are presumably illocutionary acts, are characteristic of the use of canonical
constatives, and such sentences are, by assumption, not performatives. Furthermore, acts of ordering
or requesting are typically accomplished by using imperative sentences, and acts of asking whether
something is the case are properly accomplished by using interrogative sentences, though such forms
are at best very dubious examples of performative sentences. In Lecture
XXI
of Austin (1962), the
conclusion was drawn that the locutionary aspect of speaking is what we attend to most in the case of
constatives, while in the case of the standard examples of performative sentences, we attend as much
as possible to the illocution.
The third of Austin's categories of acts is the
PERLOCUTIONARY
ACT
, which is a consequence or by-
product of speaking, whether intended or not. As the name is designed to suggest, perlocutions are
acts performed by speaking. According to Austin, perlocutionary acts consist in the production of
effects upon the thoughts, feelings, or actions of the addressee(s), speaker, or other parties, such as
causing people to refer to a certain ship as the Joseph Stalin, producing the belief that Sam and Mary
should be considered man and wife, convincing an addressee of the truth of a statement, causing an
addressee to feel a requirement to do something, and so on.
Austin (1962: 101) illustrates the distinction between these kinds of acts with the (now politically
incorrect) example of saying ÑShoot her!,Ò which he trisects as follows:
Act (A) or Locution
He said to me ÑShoot her!Ò meaning by shoot ÑshootÒ and referring by her to Ñher.Ò
Act (B) or Illocution
He urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her.
Act (C) or Perlocution
He persuaded me to shoot her.
Though it is crucial under Austin's system that we be able to distinguish fairly sharply between the
three categories, it is often difficult in practice to draw the requisite lines. Especially irksome are the
problems of separating illocutions and locutions, on the one hand, and illocutions and perlocutions
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on the other, the latter being the most troublesome problem according to Austin himself.
Austin's main suggestion for discriminating between an illocution and a perlocution was that the
former is Ñconventional, in the sense that at least it could be made explicit by the performative
formula; but the latter could notÒ (Austin 1962: 103). This, however, is more a characterization of
possible illocutionary act than a practicable test for the illocution of a particular sentence or an
utterance of it. While the test can give direct evidence as to what is not an illocutionary act, it fails to
tell us for sure what the illocution is. If, for example, someone says ÑThe bull is about to charge,Ò and
thereby warns the addressee of impending danger, do we say that the speech act of warning is here
an illocutionary act of warning because the speaker could have said ÑI warn you that the bull is about
to chargeÒ? Another reasonable interpretation would be that in this case, the warning of the
addressee, i.e., the production of a feeling of alarm, is a perlocutionary by-product of asserting that
the bull is about to charge. Many authors, such as Searle (1969, 1975a) and Allan (1998), seem to
accept the idea that potential expression by means of a performative sentence is a sufficient criterion
for the recognition of illocutions, while others, e.g. Sadock (1977), do not. Austin himself says that to
be an illocutionary act it must also be the case that the means of accomplishing it are conventional.
Though a great many subsequent discussions of illocutions are couched within some version of
Austin's theory that illocutionary acts are just those speech acts that could have been accomplished
by means of an explicit performative, there are examples, such as threatening, that remain
problematic. Nearly every authority who has touched on the subject of threats departs from the
Austinian identification of illocutionary acts with potential performatives, since threatening seems like
an illocutionary act but we cannot threaten by saying, for example, ÑI threaten you with a failing
grade.Ò
As for the distinction between the locutionary act of using particular words and constructions with
particular meanings and the illocution performed in using that locution, Austin says that there is a
difference between the locutionary
MEANING
and the illocutionary
FORCE
of the utterance. Without
independent knowledge of the use of these two words in this context, however, the criterion seems
circular. The contrast between locution and illocution is often intuitively clear, but problems and
controversies arise in the case of performative sentences such as I christen this ship the Joseph Stalin.
Is the performative prefix I christen to be excluded from the locutionary act or included within it? If it
is included, is the primary illocutionary act that is done in uttering this sentence to state that one
christens? Austin presumably would have said that to utter these words is to christen, not to state that
one christens, but Allan (1998), for example, insists that the primary illocution is to state something.
There is a considerable literature on the validity and determination of the differences among
locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions, some of which will be discussed or mentioned below.
1.2 The doctrine of infelicities
An important aspect of Austin's inquiry concerns the kinds of imperfections to which speech acts are
prey. The motivation for this interest in the way things can go wrong is that, at first sight, it appears
that constatives are just those utterances that are false when they fail, whereas failed performatives
are not aptly described as false, but rather as improper, unsuccessful, or, in general,
INFELICITOUS
. If,
for example, a passing inebriate picks up a bottle, smashes it on the prow of a nearby ship, and says,
ÑI christen this ship the Joseph Stalin,Ò we would not ordinarily say that he or she has said something
false, whereas if I describe that event by saying, ÑThe passerby christened the ship,Ò I could properly
be blamed for uttering a falsehood.
Austin distinguished three broad categories of infelicities:
A. Misinvocations, which disallow a purported act. For example, a random individual saying the
words of the marriage ceremony is disallowed from performing it. Similarly, no purported
speech act of banishment can succeed in our society because such an act is not allowed within
it.
B. Misexecutions, in which the act is vitiated by errors or omissions, including examples in
which an appropriate authority pronounces a couple man and wife, but uses the wrong names
or fails to complete the ceremony by signing the legal documents. Here, as in the case of
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misinvocations, the purported act does not take place.
C. Abuses, where the act succeeds, but the participants do not have the ordinary and expected
thoughts and feelings associated with the happy performance of such an act. Insincere
promises, mendacious findings of fact, unfelt congratulations, apologies, etc. come under this
rubric.
As interesting and influential on subsequent investigations as the doctrine of infelicities is, Austin
concluded that it failed to yield a crucial difference between performatives and constatives. In the case
of both there is a dimension of felicity that requires a certain correspondence with Ñthe facts.Ò With
illocutionary acts of assertion, statement, and the like, we happen to call correspondence with the
facts truth and a lack of it falsity, whereas in the case of other kinds of illocutions, we do not use
those particular words. Acts of asserting, stating, and the like can also be unhappy in the manner of
performatives when, for example, the speaker does not believe what he or she asserts, even if it
happens to be true.
1.3 The performative formula
Austin investigated the possibility of defining performative utterances in terms of a grammatical
formula for performatives. The formula has a first person singular subject and an active verb in the
simple present tense that makes explicit the illocutionary act that the speaker intends to accomplish
in uttering the sentence. Additionally, the formula can contain the self-referential adverb hereby:
(1) ÑI (hereby) verb-present-active X È Ñ
Such forms he calls
EXPLICIT
PERFORMATIVES
, opposing them with
PRIMARY
PERFORMATIVES
(rather than with
implicit or inexplicit performatives.) But as Austin shows, the formula is not a sufficient criterion, at
least without the adverb hereby, since in general sentences that fit the formula can be descriptive of
activities under a variety of circumstances, e.g., I bet him every morning that it will rain, or On page
49 I protest against the verdict. Nor is the formula a necessary criterion, since there are many forms
that differ from this canon and nevertheless seem intuitively to be explicit performatives. There are,
for example, passive sentences like You are fired, and cases in which the subject is not first person,
e.g., The court finds you guilty. Austin therefore came to the conclusion that the performative formula
was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the recognition of those sentences we might
want to call performatives.
There still are numerous clear cases of performative formulae, but the fact that explicit performatives
seem to shade off into constatives and other non-performative sentence types greatly weakens their
utility as a litmus for illocutionary force, since there are clear cases of illocutionary acts that cannot be
accomplished in terms of an explicit performative formulae, e.g., *I fire you. It can also be argued that
the illocutionary act performed in uttering a sentence in one or another of the sentential moods (see
below) cannot be accomplished by uttering a performative formula, since any such sentence will
necessarily be more specific than what is accomplished by the use of the simpler sentence. For
example, the illocutionary act that is accomplished by uttering Come here! can be reasonably taken to
be not an order, request, command, suggestion, or demand, but some more general act of which all
of these are more specific versions, a general act for which there is no English verb that can be used
in the performative formula. (Compare Alston's notion of
ILLOCUTIONARY
act potential discussed below.)
2 The
2 The Influence of Grice
Influence of Grice
Grice's influential articles (1957, 1967), while not dealing directly with the problems that occupied
Austin, nevertheless have had a profound influence on speech act theory. In the earlier of these
papers, Grice promulgated the idea that ordinary communication takes place not directly by means of
convention, but in virtue of a speaker's evincing certain intentions and getting his or her audience to
recognize those intentions (and to recognize that it was the speaker's intention to secure this
recognition). This holds, Grice suggested, both for speech and for other sorts of intentional
communicative acts. In his view, the utterance is not in itself communicative, but only provides clues
to the intentions of the speaker.
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A later part of Grice's program spelled out how various maxims of cooperative behavior are exploited
by speakers to secure recognition of the speaker's intentions in uttering certain words under
particular circumstances. Grice distinguished between what is
SAID
in making an utterance, that which
determines the truth value of the contribution, and the total of what is communicated. Things that are
communicated beyond what is said (in the technical sense) Grice called
IMPLICATURES
, and those
implicatures that depend upon the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative he called
CONVERSATIONAL
IMPLICATURES
(see Horn, this volume).
2.1 Strawson's
2.1 Strawson's objection to Austin
objection to Austin
Strawson (1971) criticized the Austinian view as wrongly identifying speech acts such as christening
and marrying as typical of the way language works. He pointed out that such illocutionary acts
ordinarily take place in highly formal, ritualistic, or ceremonial situations such as ship launchings and
weddings. These do indeed involve convention, Strawson conceded, but what one says on such
occasions is part of a formalized proceeding rather than an example of ordinary communicative
behavior. He argued that for more commonplace speech acts, such as are accomplished by uttering
declarative sentences of various sorts, the act succeeds by Gricean means - by arousing in the
addressee the awareness that it was the speaker's intention to achieve a certain communicative goal
and to get the addressee to reach this conclusion on the basis of his or her having produced a
particular utterance.
Warnock (1973) and Urmson (1977) go one step farther than Strawson, arguing in essence that since
the act of bidding in bridge, for example, is part of the institution of bridge, it does not even belong
to the institution of (ordinary) language (see Bird 1994 for a criticism of this point of view).
2.2 Searle's defense of Austin
Searle 1969, a work that is second only to Austin's in its influence on speech act theory, presents a
neo-Austinian analysis in which convention once again looms large, contra Grice and Strawson. While
not denying the role of Gricean intentions in communication, Searle argued that such an account is
incomplete because (1) it fails to distinguish communication that proceeds by using meanings of the
kind that only natural languages make available, and (2) it fails to distinguish between acts that
succeed solely by means of getting the addressee to recognize the speaker's intention to achieve a
certain (perlocutionary) effect and those for which that recognition is Ñin virtue of (by means of) H
[earer]'s knowledge of (certain of) the rules governing (the elements of) [the uttered sentence]
TÒ (Searle 1969: 49Ï50). Searle labels these
ILLOCUTIONARY
EFFECTS
.
Of the various locutionary acts that Austin mentions, Searle singled out the
PROPOSITIONAL
ACT
as
especially important. This, in turn, consists of two components: an
ACT
OF
REFERENCE
, in which a
speaker picks out or identifies a particular object through the use of a definite noun phrase, and a
PREDICATION
, which Searle did not see as a separate locutionary act (or any other kind of speech act),
but only as a component of the total speech act, which for him is the illocutionary force combined
with the propositional content.
Searle (1969) observed that quite often the form of an utterance displays bipartite structure, one part
of which determines the propositional act, and the other part the illocutionary act. The parts of an
utterance that together are used by a speaker to signal the propositional act he symbolized as p.
Formal features of the utterance that determine the literal illocutionary force (which are often fairly
complex) he called the
ILLOCUTIONARY
FORCE
INDICATING
DEVICE
(
IFID
), which he symbolized as F. The
form of a complete utterance used to accomplish a complete speech act, including the propositional
portion of the locution and the
IFID
, he therefore wrote as:
(2) F(p).
Among Searle's arguments for the validity of this formula was the claim that negation can be either
internal or external to the
IFID
, at least at the abstract level of grammatical analysis that Chomsky
(1965) called deep structure. Thus, if p is (underlyingly) I will come and F is I promise, there are two
negations, namely I promise not to come and I do not promise to come, the second of which Searle
said must be construed as an illocutionary act of refusing to promise something, not as an
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