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Influenced by ordinary language philosophy, and particularly by Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning as use, J.L.Austin (1962) and, later, Searle (1969) developed a systematic account of what people do when they speak (cf. the title of Austin’s lectures ‘How to do things with words’). According to Austin, it is not individual words or sentences that are the basic elements of human communication, but rather particular speech acts that are performed in uttering words and sentences, namely illocutionary acts (
illocution) or speech acts in the narrow sense. To this extent speech act theory pursues language theory as a part of a comprehensive pragmatic theory of linguistic behavior ( pragmatics). Every speech act is comprised of several sub-acts performed simultaneously (cf. the diagram above for an overview of the terminological differences between Austin and Searle).
Searle distinguishes among (a) utterance acts ( also locution): the articulation of linguistic elements in a particular grammatical order; (b) propositional acts ( proposition): the formulation of the content of an utterance through reference (i.e. reference to an object in the extralinguistic world) and predication (attribution of particular characteristics), e.g. this mushroom (=reference) is poisonous (= predication); (c) illocutionary act: the indication of the way the proposition is to be related to the word and of the communicative function of the speech act as, for example, an assertion, an ascertainment of fact, or a warning. In rare cases the illocutionary function is explicitly expressed by a performative verb in the first person singular present tense indicative (I hereby warn, maintain, promise…). Where this is not the case (as in all non-problematized communicative situations) other means, such as intonation, accent, sentence mood, adverbs, particles, or verb mood, are illocutionary indicators. In these cases one speaks of ‘primary performative’ acts. If the literally indicated illocution is different from the actually performed illocution, one speaks of ‘indirect’ speech acts. Illocutionary acts may have effects that are not conventionally associated with them; if these are intended by the speaker, they are called ‘perlocutionary effects,’ and the speaker has simultaneously carried out a (d) perlocutionary act ( perlocution).
According to Searle, for an illocutionary act to be successfully performed, four kinds of conditions—apart from general input and output conditions (conditions for normal speaking and understanding)—must be characteristically fulfilled. The specific expression of each of these four conditions is decisive for the classification of speech acts: (a) propositional content conditions, (b) preparatory conditions, (c) sincerity conditions, (d) essential conditions. In this scheme, (d) has the format of a constitutive rule, while (a)—(c) correspond to regulative rules. In formulating ‘felicity conditions’ (which assure the successful performance of speech acts) as rules for using pertinent illocutionary indicators, Searle also speaks of the ‘principle of expressibility,’ which alone allows the (basically pragmatic) analysis of speech acts to be equated with the (semantic) analysis of expressions. It should be noted that the relationship between the two is debated. Accordingly, one can distinguish between two diverging lines of thought: a speech act theory that is more semantically oriented (that is concerned with the analysis of expressions that characterize speech acts) and a pragmatically oriented speech act theory (that takes communication processes as its starting point).
References
Austin, J.L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford.
Bach, K. and R.Harnish. 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA.
Ballmer, T. and W.Brennenstuhl. 1981. Speech act classification. Berlin.
Burkhardt, A. (ed.) 1990. Speech acts, meaning and intentions: critical approaches to the philosophy of J.R. Searle. Berlin and New York.
Clark, H.H. and T.B.Carlson. 1982. Hearers and speech acts. Language 58. 332–73.
Cole, P. and J.L.Morgan (eds) 1975. Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts. New York.
Franck, D. 1979. Seven sins of pragmatics: theses about speech act theory, conversational analysis, linguistics and rhetoric. In H.Parret et al. (eds), Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics. Amsterdam. 225–36.
Fraser, B. 1975. Hedged performatives. In P.Cole and J.L.Morgan (eds), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts. New York. 187–232.
Grice, H.P. 1968.
Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J.L.Morgan (eds), Speech acts. New York. 41–58.
Katz, J.J. 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force. New York.
Levinson, S.C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge.
Sadock, J.M. 1974. Toward a linguistic theory of speech acts. New York, San Francisco, and London.
Searle, J.R. 1969. Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge.
——(ed.) 1971. The philosophy of language. Oxford.
——1975a. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In K.Gunderson (ed.), Language, mind and knowledge: Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science. Minneapolis, MN. Vol. 7. (Repr. in Expression and meaning. Cambridge, 1979. 1–29.)
——1975b. Indirect speech acts. In P.Cole and J.L.Morgan (eds), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts. New York. 344–69.
Searle, J.R., F.Kiefer, and M.Bierwisch (eds) 1980. Speech act theory and pragmatics. Dordrecht.
Strawson, P.F. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. PhR 73. 439–60.
Streeck, J. 1980. Speech acts in interaction: a critique of Searle. DPr 3. 133–54.
Tsohatzidis, S.L. (ed.) 1994. Foundations of speech act theory. London.
Ulkan, M. 1992. Zur Klassifikation von Sprechakten: eine grundlagentheoretische Fallstudie. Tübin-gen.
Venderveken, D. 1990–1. Meaning and speech acts: principles of language use, 2 vols. Cambridge.
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Oxford.
Bibliographies
Meyers, R.B. and K.Hopkins. 1977. A speech-act bibliography. Centrum 5. 73–108.
Verschueren, J. 1976. Speech act theory: a provisional bibliography with a terminological guide. Bloomington, IN.
——1978. Pragmatics: an annotated bibliography. Amsterdam.
conversation analysis, performative analysis, pragmatics
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