Page 474 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
Searle J R 1975 A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In: Gund- erson K (ed.) Language. Mind, and Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Searle J R 1979 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cam- bridge
Vendler Z 1972 Res Cogitans. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York
Wierzbicka A 1987 English Speech Act Verbs. Academic Press, Sydney
Most people, including all speech act theorists, believe language to be a practical means of communication between human beings (contrast Chomsky, who writes 'Language . . . is "essentially" a system for the expression of thought' 1975:57). With very fewexcep- tions, the purpose of speaking or writing is to cause an effect on the audience: we want our opinions to be recognized—if not adopted, our assertions to be agreed with, our requests to be enacted, questions answered, advice taken, warnings heeded, commands complied with, thanks appreciated, apologies accepted, and so forth. The implication is that speak- ing (and writing—which will from now on be properly included under 'speaking' for simplicityofexposition) is an act; to be more exact, it is a hierarchy of acts.
To begin with, language only comes into existence if someone performs an 'act of utterance,' i.e., when speaker S makes an utterance U to hearer H in context C. C is significant because an utterance is made at a certain time (establishing tense deixis), in a certain place (establishing locational deixis), by S to H(which establishes person deixis), and oftentimes in a dis- course which establishes textual deixis, cotext, and the world being spoken of. We can readily recognize an utterance act in a language that is completely unknown to us, in which we cannot distinguish the sentences used, and therefore cannot tell what S is saying to H, or asking of H, or proposing to H that H do, etc., although we guess that S is doing one of these things. The utterance act is therefore dis- tinguishable from the act of saying or asking or telling H something. In a language that we do know, two people necessarily perform separate utterance acts in order to say the same thing. A single speaker asking (or telling) someone the same thing on two different occasions, necessarily performs two different utter- ance acts. We recognize utterance acts on the basis of brute perception: by hearing them spoken, seeing them signed or written, feeling them impressed in braille.
One can make an utterance without using language; a dog can utter a bark: but such utterances lie outside of speech act theory. Speech act theory is concerned with utterances where S uses a language expression and thereby performs a 'locutionary act.' Different scholars offer slightly different definitions of the loc- utionary act (e.g., Austin 1962; Searle 1969; Bach and Harnish 1977; Recanati 1987); but let us say that in performing a locutionary act S uses an identifiable expression e from language L (where e is a sentence or sentence fragment) spoken with identifiable pros- ody n. (n is composed of the pattern of pause, pitch level, stress, tone of voice, and the like; its counterpart in the written medium is punctuation and typogra- phy.) Furthermore, the constituents and constituent structure of e and of n, together with their proper senses (intensions, meanings) are also identifiable to a typical fluent speaker of L. Recognizing the locution means recognizing that e spoken with prosody TE, which we will symbolize <TT, e>, means '/*'; conse- quently, a locution is produced and then recognized by someone who has knowledge of the grammar, lexicon, semantics, and phonology of L.
S uses a locution and applies it to a particular world Wj at time tji and this constitutes the 'act of referring' (or a 'denotational act'). Austin, whose How To Do
Things With Words (1962) first awakened wide inter- est in speech acts, included the act of referring as part of the locutionary act (p. 109), and they were first separated by John Searle in Speech Acts (1969:8Iff). S's act of referring occurs at a certain time in a certain place in a certain context, and the reference is influ- enced by all those factors, whereas the sense and inten- sion of the expression is not. What Speaker does is to use the intensions of language-expressions (e and its constituents) to identify things in the world s/he is speaking of. The locution / totaled my car yesterday has the (virtually) unchanging sense: 'Speaker did irreparable damage to his or her car the day before this sentence was uttered.' However, the denotation
452
Speech Act Hierarchy K. Allan