Languages & Linguistics
Speech Acts
Speech acts refer to the actions performed through speech, such as making requests, giving orders, or making promises. This concept, introduced by philosopher J.L. Austin and further developed by John Searle, emphasizes that utterances not only convey information but also have the power to perform actions. Speech acts are an important aspect of pragmatics, the study of language use in context.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
12 Key excerpts on "Speech Acts"
eBook - PDF- Chris Cummins(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
We can use language to perform a remarkable array of social actions – to ask questions, issue commands, greet people, thank them, apologise, and so on – including many actions that rely on enormously elaborate shared social institu-tions (e.g. declaring two people to be married, sentencing someone for a crime, naming a ship, and so on). The term speech act is often used when we are discussing an utterance in terms of the social action that it is used to perform. Speech Acts 187 In one construal of pragmatics, Speech Acts are the epitome of the discipline: they represent the very essence of language in use. However, as noted way back in Chapter 1, the focus in this book is on the processes by which we understand meaning that goes beyond what is literally said. From this point of view, it would appear that there’s a limited amount that we can say about an example like (299): we can point out that the hearer needs to appeal to the context of utterance in order to resolve the pronoun you , but apart from that, what is going on in this utterance is fairly easy to determine. (299) I now pronounce you husband and wife. Nevertheless, examples like (299) are interesting in one particular respect, namely their status as performative utterances – those which appear to bring about the action that they describe – and as these are highly relevant to the historical development of approaches to Speech Acts, I’ll discuss them further in section 8.1. A more general issue of pragmatic interest, in the sense meant here, is that it is very frequently not obvious (on first inspection) what kind of speech act is being performed. Consider (300)–(302). (300) Pass the salt. (301) Could you pass the salt? (302) I’d be grateful if you would pass the salt. These examples appear to perform similar social actions, aiming to bring about the same outcome, but they use quite different linguistic means to do that.
eBook - PDF- Jose Medina(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurement. Constructing an object from a description (a drawing). Reporting an event. Speculating about an event. Forming and testing a hypothesis. Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams. Making up a story; and reading it. Play-acting. Singing catches. Guessing riddles. Making a joke; telling it. Solving a problem in practical arithmetic. Translating from one language into another. Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (1958 §23) And this is of course a list that has to be left open, for our linguistic activities or practices are living things that are always changing. The use of language is as unpredictable as human action, for indeed an utterance is itself an act. The point is not simply that speech relates to action, but rather, that speech itself is action. This point was elab-orated in full by J. L. Austin's influential account of 'performative utterances'. Although we have already made an incursion into Speech Act Theory with Habermas, let's now go to its origins with Austin and his account of speech as action. Austin revolutionized analytic Philosophy of Language by drawing attention to the close and con-stitutive link between language and performance. In the now classic paper 'Performative utterances' (1979) Austin developed his perfor-mative account as an argument against a well-entrenched bias in the philosophical tradition: the pervasive assumption that 'the sole busi-ness, the sole interesting business, of any utterance -that is, of any-thing we say - is to be true or at least false' (p. 233). Given this bias, Austin complains, in the Philosophy of Language all utterances have been assimilated to declarative statements', that is, they have been conceived as declarations or assertions whose contents are descrip-tions that have to be assessed in terms of their truth or falsity.
eBook - ePub- Jürgen Habermas(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
If I understand the command that my girlfriend gives me (or someone else) when she tells me (or that other person) to drop my gun, then I know fairly well what action she has carried out: she has uttered this specific command. This action does not remain in need of interpretation in the same sense as does the running past of my hurrying friend. For in the standard case of literal meaning, a speech act makes the intention of the speaker known; a hearer can infer from the semantic content of the utterance how the sentence uttered is being used, that is, what type of action is being performed with it. Speech Acts interpret themselves; they have a self-referential structure. The illocutionary element establishes, as a kind of pragmatic commentary, the sense in which what is said is being used. Austin’s insight that one does something by saying something has a reverse side to it: by performing a speech act, one also says what one is doing. Admittedly, this performative sense of a speech act reveals itself only to a potential hearer who, in adopting the stance of a second person, has given up the perspective of an observer in favor of that of a participant. One has to speak the same language and, as it were, enter the intersubjectively shared lifeworld of a linguistic community in order to benefit from the peculiar reflexivity of natural language and to be able to base the description of an action carried out with words on understanding the implicit self-commentary of this speech act.Speech Acts differ from simple nonlinguistic activities not only by virtue of this reflexive characteristic of self-interpretation but also by virtue of the kind of goals that can be intended through speaking, as well as the kind of successes that can be achieved. Certainly, at a general level, all actions, linguistic and nonlinguistic ones, can be conceived of as goal-oriented activity. However, as soon as we wish to differentiate between action oriented toward reaching understanding and purposive activity,
eBook - PDFSpeech Acts, Meaning and Intentions
Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle
- Armin Burkhardt(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
By decline of a paradigm therefore I do not mean that speech act theory has not been a useful analytic tool, that an action theoretical approach to linguistic utterances is completely wrong or that speech act theory in general and the positions of Austin and Searle in particular have not contributed to a better understanding of human social acting. 45 But what I do mean is that, in the course of the three decades of its history, speech act theory has undergone a development from the Austinian pragmatic beginnings via different, more or less intentionalist approaches and Searle's hybrid conception to what might be called a (lexical) semantic view of Speech Acts. Here, I think, speech act theory has come to an end. References Alston, W.P. (1963), Meaning and use. In: The Philosophical Quarterly, 13, (51), 107-24. Anscombe, G.E.M. (1957), Intention. Oxford. 43 Or, to say in Davidson's words: The provoked response is not, of course, part of my action, only part of its description. (1982, 71) And one might add that this holds for intentions, contents and purposes, too. 44 Moreover, their propositional content is a linguistic entity whereas the representative content is clearly non-linguistic 45 For a profound criticism of speech act theory from the point of view of conversational analysis cf. Franck 1981. 126 Armin Burkhardt Austin, J.L. (1976), Philosophical Papers. Ed. by J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock. Lon-don-Oxford-New York, 2nd edition, 233-52. Austin, J.L. (1963), Performative-Constative. In: Caton, C.E. (ed.), Philosophy and Ordinary Language. Urbana, 111., 22 — 54. Austin, J.L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words. Oxford. Bach, K. (1975), Performatives are statements, too. In: Philosophical Studies, 28, 229—36. Bach, K./Harnish, R.M. (1979), Linguistic Communication ana Speech Acts. Cambridge, Mass.-London. Ballmer, Th. T./Brennenstuhl, W. (1981), Speech Act Classification. A Study in the Lexical Analysis of English Speech Activity Verbs.
eBook - PDF- M. Placencia, Kenneth A. Loparo, Rosina Márquez Reiter(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
In relation to this, Linell (1996) accentuates the point that speech act theory gives all acts an equal status, and protests 40 Spanish Pragmatics that there are in fact acts that are 'typically responsive in character' (p. 137), by which he means that they presuppose certain prior acts. At first glance, however, all these criticisms stand in stark contrast with the multiplicity of speech act studies available on different lan- guages and contexts (Blum-Kulka, 1997). In other words, if the theory is regarded as problematic in so many ways, how can its fruitfulness in empirical research be explained? Blum-Kulka (1997) shed light on this matter with her observation that the effectiveness in the application of the theory is found mostly in the study of single Speech Acts rather than in stretches of discourse (p. 59). As the reader will see in 2.5, this is a situation which speech act studies by Hispanists also attest to. A number of scholars have highlighted the strengths of speech act theory although the majority seem to concur that it needs to be mod- ified and supplemented to account for discourse. For instance, Streeck (1980) stressed the functions Speech Acts perform in the construction of social events. He said that speech act performance 'plays a part in the negotiation of social relationships amongst participants and situates exchanged information (propositions) in these relational contexts' and that, as such, '[s]peech acts are ... involved in the interactive constitu- tion of normative orders of human relations' (p. 152) (his emphasis). However, he was of the view that speech act performance needs to be examined 'within a larger framework of interaction analysis' (p. 152). More explicitly, for Streeck, the usefulness of the theory for the study of discourse is dependent upon whether the interactional context of speech act performance and the intersubjective constitution of speech act forms and functions are adequately considered (p. 151).
eBook - ePub- Anne O'Keeffe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 6Speech Acts
Consider extract 6.1 from a telephone conversation between a health advisor and a female patient. The exchange takes place at the end of the phone consultation.6.1 Introduction(6.1)The health advisor asks a standard question which forms part of a protocol of the particular service and the patient answers his questions. In asking the questions, the health advisor is performing the (speech) action of a request for information. The patient complies with this request and provides the appropriate answers. In this highly institutionalised context, the way in which the request is being made is very explicit so as to avoid any confusion or miscommunication. There are other situations where Speech Acts are performed in a less explicit way and participants to a conversation have to infer the meaning of what is said through reference to contextual information. Examples which are often quoted to illustrate this point are the use of statements or observations, such as It’s late or It’s cold . Depending on the context in which such utterances are used, they may carry different functions. The former may be a suggestion to leave a party while the latter may be a request to shut the window. When we consider examples like this in language corpora or other sources of naturally occurring discourse, such utterances are hardly ever ambiguous, as the surrounding context and co-text point to the intended meaning. The notion of directness and indirectness, and of literal and intended meaning, has been a chief concern dealt with in Speech Act Theory .At the heart of Speech Act Theory lies the assumption that utterances can be described in terms of the actions they perform, as highlighted by J. L. Austin in his book How to Do Things with Words (1962). Speech Act Theory provides a taxonomy of the different functions that utterances might perform, and it also offers an approach to understanding the apparent discrepancy between what we say and what we mean. Speech Act Theory has since played a key role in linguistics and philosophy, and has enjoyed applications in a range of other disciplines, such as in the modelling of Speech Acts for computational linguistics, and the study of pragmatic competence in inter- and intra-linguistic contexts (see Chapter 7
eBook - ePub- Anne O'Keeffe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 1 ). Depending on the context in which such utterances are used, they may carry different functions. The former may be a suggestion to leave a party while the latter may be a request to shut the window. When we consider examples like this in language corpora or other sources of naturally-occurring discourse, such utterances are hardly ever ambiguous as the surrounding context and co-text often point to the intended meaning.The notion of directness and indirectness and of literal and intended meaning have been a chief concern dealt with in Speech Act Theory. At the heart of Speech Act Theory lies the assumption that utterances can be described in terms of the actions they perform, as highlighted by J. L. Austin in his book How to Do Things with Words (1962). Speech Act Theory provides a taxonomy of the different functions that utterances might perform, and it also offers an approach to understanding the apparent discrepancy between what we say and what we mean. Speech Act Theory has since played a key role in linguistics and philosophy, and has enjoyed applications in a range of other disciplines, such as in the modelling of Speech Acts for computational linguistics, and the study of pragmatic competence in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contexts (see Chapters 6 , 7 and 8 ).In this chapter we will provide an overview of Speech Act Theory. We will discuss and illustrate the main arguments advanced within Speech Act Theory and introduce some of the underlying assumptions on which this theory is based. We will also highlight the importance of context, both at the level of discourse and at the wider level of situation, in the analysis of Speech Acts. We will draw on examples from a number of different corpora in this chapter.5.2 SPEECH ACT THEORY
Speech Act Theory emerged in the 1960s against the backdrop of theories focused on language structure and individual sentences which were mainly analysed according to their descriptive qualities. Such ‘sentences’ were seen to have a truth value, i.e. they could be either true or false, and were also referred to as ‘constatives’. Examples of constatives are sentences like ‘The sky is blue’ or ‘The cat is in the house’. In his initial work Austin (1962) suggested a division between ‘constatives’ and ‘performatives’ to reflect the fact that the former could be analysed as either being ‘true’ or ‘false’ while the latter could be described in terms of the act that they perform when uttered in a given context.
eBook - PDF- Marina Sbisà, Ken Turner, Marina Sbisà, Ken Turner(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Language and declarative Speech Acts are presented as means by which deonticity enters human relations. Speech Acts, being units of meaning in communication, are also vehicles for deontic values. Thus, language is given a significant power as a source of all human institutions and resulting commitments. Law and deontic rela-tionships are not only expressed in language, but they derive from it; they are in-ternal to Speech Acts. In Making the Social World , Searle (2010) explicitly addresses problems discussed by other researchers based on speech act theory, e.g. in the models which focus on performance of identity and gender, as well as freedom of ex-pression and hate speech. Significantly, he depicts perlocutionary effects of hate speech as dependent on the addressee, which contradicts claims voiced by theor-ists such as Butler, Langton and McKinnon, whose ideas are summarised in Sec-tion 3.4. Searle’s is evidently a controversial proposal with its relatively static picture of seemingly well-ordered, systematic reality, but it offers its own ontology of the so-cial world and its own explanation of how obligations arise in the world. It offers a solution to the old legal (and moral) problem, originally discussed by David Hume, of how to derive “ought” from “is”, i.e. how to move from an epistemic description to a deontic relation. Significantly, Searle commented on the problem in the 1960s (Searle 1964) and although he does not seem to have solved it, he undoubtedly con-tributed to its greater exposition. 3. Applications of speech act theory in the legal domain Speech act theory has found numerous applications in the interface of law and lan-guage.
eBook - PDF- Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe, Mareile Schramm(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
But can we say that speaker B in (3b) performs an action by saying “Yeh” ? Compared with the instances we discussed above, such as promising, commanding, etc., this ap-pears to be problematic. In general, however, it seems that the notion of speech act can cover a considerable number of instances in speakers’ linguistic behav-iour. We should therefore conclude that speakers perform certain acts by using language, and that in cases where we cannot recognise such acts we should poss-ibly seek for other explanations, outside Speech Act Theory. In the next section we will take a closer look at how acting through language actually works. Expressing intentions through language 173 6.2.2. Speech Acts: a closer look In the present section we will deal with the question of how performing a cer-tain speech act works in detail. To do so, we will use the following example. Imagine your aunt, a champion cake-baker and tea-time-organiser, invites you and your younger sister to have a cup of tea with her one nice afternoon. You really enjoy your aunt’s apple pie and want to pay her a compliment. What you say is: (4) What a delicious pie! What aspects are conveyed in this speech act? One crucial thing conveyed in (4) is a certain semantic meaning. We have discussed this type of meaning in chapter 5 already, where it was also referred to as ‘sentence meaning’. You have seen that semantic meaning can be derived compositionally from the semantic meanings of separate words a given sentence consists of. So the semantic meaning of the example in (4) is: ‘This sweet fruit cake is tasty’. Be-side the semantic meaning, the sentence in (4) also has a certain syntactic structure. It is an ‘exclamatory sentence’, i.e. a verbless sentence which be-gins with what or how followed by a noun phrase, and is typically used to sig-nal speakers’ emotions. Another crucial aspect conveyed in (4) is the speak-er’s communicative intention.
eBook - PDFCross-Cultural Pragmatics
The Semantics of Human Interaction
- Anna Wierzbicka, Werner Winter(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Whether the assumptions and intentions expressed in our formulae are sincerely held by people who perform appropriate Speech Acts is, from a semantic point of view, quite irrele-vant. I am not claiming anything about the real intentions of a person who warns, threatens, or requests. I am only claiming that when some- Some Australian speech-act verbs 165 one says I warn you or Careful! This gun is loaded!, the attitude conveyed can be described in the verb warn, and that when someone says he warned me, that attitude is attributed to the speaker (cf. Skinner 1970; Hymes 1974b:182-183). Similarly, one can very well say: She ordered him to go, but she didn't really want to be obeyed. This means that it would be incorrect to describe a sentence such as 'X ordered Y to do Z' in terms of 'X wanted Y to do Z'. But it would be correct to describe it in terms of X's saying (or otherwise conveying the meaning of): 'I want you to do Z' (cf. Wierzbicka 1974). Semantics is not concerned with people's 'real' (as opposed to con-veyed) intentions and assumptions. The task of speech-act analysis consists in modelling in explicit and verifiable formulae the attitudes that people convey in speech by conventional linguistic means (which, of course, include the intonation). The task of semantics in general con-sists in modelling in explicit and verifiable formulae the meanings which people convey in speech (again, by conventional linguistic means). In what follows, I am going to discuss a number of language-specific Speech Acts and speech genres, drawn from a few different languages, trying to show that each of them embodies a mode of social interaction characteristic of a particular culture. Informal discussion will be supple-mented by rigorous semantic description, which will take the form of explications formulated in the proposed metalanguage of universal semantic primitives.
eBook - PDF- Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
15 That Speech Acts and face-work should overlap is not surprising, of course, given Speech Acts primarily help us to “do” things with language and when we “do” those things we impact upon our interlocutors’ and/or our own actions or environment in some way. The idea of a multidimensional pragmatic space is especially useful when seeking to trace the historical development of Speech Acts, as the theoretical framework (as devised by Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000) seeks to allow for diachronic as well as synchronic variation. In addition, the inclusion of “context-specific” and “culture-specific” co-ordinates (Bertuccelli Papi 2000: 64) encourages us to be sensitive to ways of “doing” facework that may exhibit cultural and historical biases. Yet, I would argue that more detailed work is required if we are to fully appreciate the relation-ship between the realisations of Speech Acts and our understanding of (im)polite-ness in various contexts, both historical and modern. For example, we might undertake further research as a means of determining whether: – as is the case in Westernised contexts today, “experiential norms”, that is, norms that have their basis in each individual’s total experiences (Culpeper 2008: 29) affected the historic realisation of Speech Acts at all; or – as seems to be believed, Speech Acts of times past were solely determined by the interlocutors’ understanding of shared norms for their given activity or con-text-of-situation (see, e.g., Taavitsainen and Jucker’s 2008b: 225 comments in respect to Speech Acts being “firmly embedded in social practices”; see also Watts 2003). Literary works, both historical and modern, probably provide us with the best means of determining the existence (if any) of experiential norms, as authors tend to develop their characters in ways that make them distinctive from one another.
- Sebastian Kempgen, Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, Karl Gutschmidt, Sebastian Kempgen, Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, Karl Gutschmidt(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
12.3. Another contrastive study, dealing with the expressions of Speech Acts in Serbian, Russian and Polish has been presented by Doychil Voyvodich (2002). Even though he presents his analysis as a functional-semantic investigation of sentences with certain verb forms, it is rather an analysis and description of “acts” than of verbal semantics overlapping with communicative interaction. (As for a “direct”/explicit way of per-formance of a speech act, Voyvodich accepts not only 1st Pers. Ind. Sg. Pres. Indicative, e.g., prosze , but also Fut. poprosze, or Cond. ( po ) prosilbym , i. e., for him, the presence of the lexical item denoting a speech act is the most important one, the form of a 79. Speech Acts in Slavic Languages 1077 verb (except for the Past Tense) playing the secondary role. His description of gradual quantification/intensification of illocutionary force concentrates on “prescriptive Speech Acts” (i. e., directives) employing both semantic primitives (“I want”/“I wish”) as a common constituent of the “prescriptives” in all the mentioned languages and, more importantly, speaker’s pragmatic presuppositions (called here “implicit constitu-ents”) related to different variations of “prescriptives”. The relevant pragmatic presup-positions which in fact are the basic conditions increasing/decreasing the intensity of illocutionary force expressed can be paraphrased like “I suppose that I can” ( to please/ beg, to suggest, to invite ), “I believe that I can” ( to advice, to warn ), “I believe that I have a right” ( to require ), “I am positive that I have a right (a priori)” ( to order, to forbid, to permit ). Special attention is paid to lexical (particles) and grammatical (mood) means of expression marking the various levels of “illocutionary force inten-sity” regularly, the decline of intensity at the same time means a higher level of politeness. Quantification of illocutionary force, in author’s opinion, belongs to lan-guage universals.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
