Page 479 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

sarcastic. Finally, take the case of the tennis player in the US Open who claims that his opponent's ball is 'out' when the umpire disagrees: the claim has no standing because the player is not a person sanctioned by the preparatory conditions on this illocutionary act to declare the ball out of play. Again, by violating the preparatory condition, S risks condemnation. The question arises whether the preparatory conditions on an illocutionary act really are its presuppositions, as Karttunen and Peters (1979:10) apparently believe. The problem, which cannot be solved here (cf. Allan 1998), is that only some illocutionary acts have truth conditions, yet the standard definition of pre- supposition is based on truth conditions (X is a pre- supposition of Y if it is true that Y entails X and also true that —,Y entails X). As Seuren (1985: ch. 3) recognizes, some alternative definition of pre- supposition seems called for.
Austin requires that the procedure invoked by the illocutionary act 'must be executed by all participants correctly and completely.' He exemplifies this 'execu- tive condition' with / bet you the race won't be run today said when more than one race was arranged for that day. But such misexecutions should be dealt with under generally applicable maxims of the cooperative principle. The only executive condition which still seems warranted to linguists is one on declarations which either bring about or express decisions on states of affairs such as marriage, job appointment/ termination, or umpiring. Because they rely for their success on S being sanctioned by the community to perform the acts under stipulated conditions, it may be necessary to safeguard society's interest with an executive condition requiring some watchdog other than S to ensure that the sanctions are respected. These sanctions need to be written into the pre- paratory conditions on the act; they identify the atti- tude or behavior that must be observed by S when executing the illocutionary act in order for it to be felicitous.
The sincerity condition on a speech act involves S's responsibility for what s/he is saying (asking, etc.). If S is observing the cooperative maxim of quality, then s/he will be sincere; and, normally, H will assume that S is being sincere unless s/he has good reason to believe otherwise. Generally, scholars have assumed that different kinds of illocutionary acts involve different kinds of sincerity conditions: for example, assertions and the like are sincere if S believes in the truth of the proposition asserted; requests are sincere if S believes that H can do A and might be willing to do A; dec- larations are sincere if S believes that s/he has the proper authority to make the declaration. Obviously, sincerity reflects on whether or not S upholds the preparatory conditions, so only one sincerity con- dition should be necessary: in uttering U, S knows or believes (or believes s/he knows) that all clauses of the preparatory condition hold. This puts a burden on
precise statement of the preparatory conditions; but that seems exactly where it should lie, because pre- paratory conditions identify the particular cir- cumstances appropriate to performing a given illocutionary act.
To sum up: the only one of Austin's original felicity conditions that remains obligatory in the definitions of all illocutions is the preparatory condition. An executive condition may be valid for declarations. Some scholars still include sincerity conditions within definitions for illocutionary acts, but sincerity can be captured by generally applicable conditions on language use. Finally, linguists rarely attend to ful- fillment conditions, nor should they—though these will remain important to scholars in other disciplines concerned with perlocutionary effects of utterances. The burden of felicitous illocution will depend on proper observation of the preparatory conditions on each illocutionary act. These conditions provide the grounds for motivating S to make the utterance and grounds from which H will evaluate the illocutionary act expressed in the utterance.
See: Felicity Conditions.
6. Explicit Performative Clauses
The characteristics of explicit performative clauses are as follows. The clause must contain a verb that names the illocutionary point of the utterance, for example, admit, advise, apologize, ask, assert, authorize, baptize, bet, charge, claim, command, congratulate, declare, order, pardon, permit, prohibit, promise, refuse, say, suggest, swear, tell, thank, urge. It must be in the present tense; in English, it is typically in the simple aspect, but may be progressive: thus / promise/am promising to accompany you are performative; / pro- mised/have promised to accompany you are not. An explicit performative clause may be negative; it may be emphatic; and it may contain the adverb hereby, meaning 'in/by uttering this performative' (but not meaning 'using this,' referring to something in the context). It must be 'realis' and denote the actu- alization of the illocutionary act; therefore I musther- eby take my leave of you is a performative, / might hereby authorize your release is not. Finally, S must be agent for whoever takes responsibility for enforcing the illocutionary point of U.
See: Performative Clauses.
7. Classes of Speech Act
There have been two approaches to classifying speech acts: one, following Austin (1962), is principally a lexical classification of so-called illocutionary verbs; the other, following Searle (1975a), is principally a classification of acts. Lexical groupings of sem- antically similar illocutionary verbs are made on an intuitive basis, perhaps with some reference to the syntactic environment of the verb (as in Vendler's
Speech Act Theory: Overview
457