Page 478 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
interject here. The simpler one is that the illocutionary point of U is S's message. The second point is that S tailors U to suit H, taking into account what s/he knows or guesses about H's ability to understand the message which S wants to convey. The notion of a reflexive-intention is S's intention to have a person in earshot recognize that S wants him/her to accept the role of H and therefore be the/an intended recipient of S's message and consequently react to it. This, of course, renders the definition of H circular, and so something closer to Grice's( 1957,1968,1969) original proposal should be considered, adapted to our cus- tomary terminology and with some updating from Recanati (1987:ch.7): S's reflexive-intentiontoward H is the intention to have H recognize that when uttering U in context C, S intends U to have a certain perlocutionary effect on H partly caused by H recog- nizing that S has the intention to communicate with him/her by means of U. This last intention is the
illocutionary intention. (So, when Joe hears Sue talk- ing in her sleep, he will not assume she has a reflexive- intention toward him, and therefore not expect that she intends her utterance to have any perlocutionary effect on him—though she might unintentionally keep him awake.)
Clark and Carlson (1982) distinguish between H as 'direct addressee' and H as 'ratified participant,' the latter being a member of the audience participating in the speech act (cf. Goffman 1981:131). The notion of face (Brown and Levinson 1987) is useful in dis- tinguishing between two kinds each of H's and overhearers. An 'addressee' is someone who cannot reject the role of H without serious affront to S's face. Direct address is determined contextually—by direction of gaze, pointing a finger, touching an arm, using a name, or on the basis of who spoke last; less commonly, the nature of the message will determine who is the intended addressee. Note the change of addressee in Joan, Max bought me this beautiful ring
for our anniversary, didn't you Max, you sweetie! and the nonspecific addressee in Congratulations, whoever came first! A 'ratified participant' can reject the H role more freely than an addressee and with less of an affront to S's face. When S is speaking, all those who can reasonably consider themselves ratified par- ticipants are expected, as part of the cooperative en- deavor, to keep tabs on what is said, so that if called upon to participate they may do so appropriately.
Any other person hearing U is an overhearer: either a bystander or an eavesdropper. People in earshot are expected to overhear, though not necessarily to listen; only H's are properly expected to listen. As everyone knows, it can happen that U is overheard by someone when there was no original specific intention on S's part that this should happen; to put it more precisely, S has a reflexive-intention towards H but not towards an overhearer. An overhearer may perchance under- stand the message the same way that H does; but,
because s/he is not necessarily party to the appropriate contextual information relevant to the correct interpretation of the utterance, it is possible that s/he may seriously misinterpret it. So, a bystander within earshot was not originally intended as a H and may, depending on circumstances, accept or reject the role of H without loss of face; consider an occasion where X is arguing with Y in earshot of Z:
456
[X to Y as addressee]
[Y to Z as ratified participant]
PC to Z as bystander]
[Z to both X and Y, rejecting the role of H]
Shut up or I'll lay one on you.
You heard him threaten to hit me, didn't you?
You mind your own business.
I wasn't listening.
An eavesdropper can only admit to listening in at the expense of their own positive face, because it makes her/him look bad, and sometimes also at the expense of S's negative (impositive) face, because S feels affronted by the intrusion.
5. Felicity Conditions
Austin argued for four kinds of felicity conditions: (a) a preparatory condition to establish whether or not the circumstances of the speech act and the par- ticipants in it are appropriate to its being performed successfully; (b) an executive condition to determine whether or not the speech act has been properly executed; (c) a sincerity condition—which has a simi- lar function to Grice's (1975) maxim of quality; and (d) a fulfillment condition determined by the per- locutionary effect of the speech act. If all the relevant felicity conditions were satisfied for a given illo- cutionary act, Austin described it as 'happy' or 'fel- icitous.' One can immediately dismiss (d) as irrelevant to a linguistic theory of speech acts because it has only a contingent link with the meaning of U. The other three felicity conditions merit brief discussion here.
The statement of preparatory conditions is obliga- tory in definitions of illocutions. The preparatory con- ditions identify what ought to be presupposed in a felicitous use of the illocution. For example, the pre- paratory condition on an assertion such as France is a republic (=p) is'S has reason to believe that p.' If S had said France is not a republic, S would be con- demned for being ignorant, deluded, insane, or maliciously attempting to mislead H. It is notable that presupposition failure (in, say, In 1990, the King of France died) gives rise to exactly the same response. In both cases, Austin would say 'the utterance is void.' Condemnation as a response to preparatory condition failure is common to all illocutions. Take the pre- paratory condition on thanking: 'H, or someone or something in H's charge, has done some deed D with the apparent intention of benefiting S (directly or indirectly)'; if S thanks H for D when H never did D, H will conclude that S is either deluded or is being