Page 477 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

the right conditions, S performs, respectively, an act of naming, an act of apologizing, an act of welcoming, and an act of advising (it has become usual to speak of 'acts' rather than 'actions'). Performatives have 'felicity conditions' (see Sect. 5 below) in place of truth values. Thus according to Austin, (1) has no truth value but is felicitous if there is a cat such that S has the ability and intention to put it out, and infel- icitous—but not false—otherwise:
means '/i'; consequently, a locution is produced and then recognized by someone who has knowledge of the grammar, lexicon, semantics, and phonology of L.
S uses the senses of language-expressions in the locution (e and its constituents) to identify things in the particular world that s/he is speaking of. This constitutes the 'prepositional act of referring' or 'denotational act.'
The final act in the hierarchy of speaking is the 'illocutionary act.' S does something in uttering U to H in context C, for example, states a fact or an opinion, confirms or denies something, makes a prediction, a promise, a request, offers thanks or an invitation, issues an order or an umpire's decision, gives advice or permission, names a child, swears an oath. Thus U is said to have the 'illocutionary force' or 'illo- cutionary point' of a statement, a confirmation, a denial, a prediction, a promise, a request, and so forth. Obviously, under normal conditions of use, S makes an utterance, uses a locution, denotes with it, and expresses at least one illocution, all at one and the same moment.
With very few exceptions, the purpose of speaking is to cause an effect on H (Austin described this as 'securing uptake'): speakers want their opinions to be recognized if not adopted, their assertions to be agreed with, their requests to be enacted, questions answered, advice taken, warnings heeded, commands complied with, thanks appreciated, apologies accepted, and so forth. These are called 'perlocutions' or 'per- locutionary effects.' The perlocutionary effect of U is the consequence of H recognizing (what s/he takes to be) the locution and illocutionary point of U— otherwise the effect is not perlocutionary. Although extremely significant within a theory of communi- cation, perlocutionary acts/effects fall outside of linguistics because they are not part of language per se but instead responses to the illocutions in utterances. What linguists can properly look at, however, are the intentions of speakers to bring about certain per- locutionary effects; these intentions appear in defi- nitions of speech acts as 'illocutionary intentions'.
See: Speech Act Hierarchy.
4. The Speaker's Reflexive-intention; Hearers, and Overhearers
In the spoken medium, there is never more than one S per utterance; however, two S's may utter identical U's in unison or S may speak on someone else's behalf. Coauthors generally take joint responsibility for what is written; but, normally, each writes only a part of the text. This all starkly contrasts with the number of H's which any given S may have for an audience.
H is anyone whom, at the time of utterance, S reflexively intends should recognize the illocutionary point of U. There are a couple of explanations to
I promise to put the cat out.
(1)
This contrasts with (2), which is either true if S has put the cat out, or false if not:
I've put the cat out. (2)
Austin's claim that performatives do not have truth values has been challenged from the start, and he seems to be wrong. Roughly speaking, their truth value is less communicatively significant than what Austin called the 'illocutionary force' of U. He observed that utterances without performative verbs also perform speech acts, for example, (3) can be used to make a promise:
I'll put the cat out. (3)
Austin would say that (1) and (3) have the same illo- cutionary force of promising; the function of the per- formative verb in (1) is to name the 'illocutionary act' being performed. In the later lectures of Austin (1962), he identified two other components of a speech act: locution and perlocution. Linguists recognize three acts which Austin conflates into his locutionary act.
3. The Hierarchy within Speech Acts
Speaking (and writing—which will from now on be properly included under 'speaking' for simplicity of exposition) comprises a hierarchy of acts. To begin with, language only comes into existence if someone performs an 'act of utterance.' People recognize utter- ance acts on the basis of brute perception: by hearing them spoken, seeing them signed or written, feeling them impressed in braille. Individuals can readily recognize an utterance act in a language that is com- pletely unknown to them, in which they cannot dis- tinguish the words or sentences used. One can utter sounds which have nothing to do with language.
Speech act theory is concerned with utterances where S utters a language expression and thereby per- forms a 'locutionary act.' Performing a locutionary act, S uses an identifiable expression e from language L (where e is a sentence or sentence fragment) spoken with identifiable prosody n (the pattern of pause, pitch level, stress, and tone of voice; its counterpart in the written medium is punctuation and typography). The constituent structure of e and of n, together with their proper senses (meanings), are also identifiable to a typical fluent speaker of L. Recognizing the locution means recognizing that e spoken with prosody n
Speech Act Theory: Overview
455