Page 488 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
Server:
Customer proffers money:
Server accepts money, hands over goods:
That'll be $10. [On record statement of the payment required to execute the transaction; thereby making an off record request for payment to execute it]
OK. [Agrees to contract of sale thereby fulfilling buyer's side of the bargain]
Have a nice day. [Fulfills seller's side of the bargain and concludes interaction with a conventional farewell]
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As in most interactions, the interlocutors each have an agenda; and to carry out the plan, the illocutions within a discourse are ordered with respect to one another. The effect is to create coherent discourse in which S upholds his/her obligations to H. Future work on speech acts needs to account for the contribution of individual speech acts to a discourse or text; and that leads into the realm of conversational or dis- course analysis.
Very little work has been done on the contribution of the illocutions within utterances/sentences to the development of understanding in written texts. (How- ever, see Harrah (1994) for some interesting proposals.) Texts, whether spoken or written, display one or more of four perlocutionary functions, accord- ing to Brewer and Lichtenstein (1982). Social inter- action predominates in what Malinowski called phatic communion (social chit-chat), informativeness pre- dominates in academic texts, persuasiveness in elec- tion speeches, and entertainment in novels. But many texts combine some or all of these functions in varying degrees to achieve their communicative purpose; for instance, although an academic text is primarily informative, it also tries to persuade readers to reach a certain point of view; it needs to be entertaining enough to keep the reader's attention; and most aca- demic texts try to get the reader on their side through social interactive techniques such as use of authorial 'we' to include the reader. The contribution of the illocutions of individual utterances to the under- standing of topics and episodes (macrostructures)
within texts is sorely in need of study.
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