Masarykova univerzita
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w.i)Speech Act TheoryThe term “speech acts” is related to the theory which was originally proposed by J. L. Austin within the framework of ordinary language philosophy. Austin’s course of lectures How to Do Things with Words (1962), which is “widely acknowledged as the first presentation of what has come to be called speech act theory” (Schiffrin 1994:50), attacks the opinion that the key function of sentences is to state facts. On the contrary, he claims that sentences such as: "I bet you six pence it will rain tomorrow, I apologize, and I give my word are not used just to say things, i.e. describe states of affairs, but rather actively to do things” (Levinson 1983:228, emphasis added). That is why Austin called these utterances “performatives”: “the name [...] indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action - it is not normally thought of as just saying something” (Austin 1962:6-7). He also contrasted performatives to “statements, assertions and utterances like them, which he called constatives” (Levinson 1983:229). As Levinson explains, Austin defined a set of conditions which “performatives must meet if they are to succeed” (1983:229). They are called “felicity conditions” (Austin 1962:14-15). If these conditions are not met, which can happen under certain circumstances, performatives are “infelicitous”, or “unhappy” then. Constatives, on the other hand, are “declarative statements whose truth or falsity can be judged” (Schiffrin 1994:50). Searle and Vanderveken (1985) go further and distinguish these three possibilities of successful or unsuccessful performance of speech acts: “a speech act may be unsuccessful, it may be successful but defective, and it may be successful and nondefective” (1985:12). If a speech act is successful but defective, it means that a speaker has made a statement but he has insufficient amount of evidence for it. Despite the fact that there is lack of evidence, the speaker may succeed in making a statement, nevertheless, it would be defective by reason of this deficient amount of evidence. As Searle and Vanderveken observe, ideally, a speech act is both successful and nondefective. Austin's differentiation between "felicitous" and "infelicitous" speech acts does not reflect the “successful but defective” distinction. Levinson stresses, quite correctly, the unsystematic nature of Austin’s work (1983:231). Moreover, there are two important modifications during the course of the book. At first, Austin takes the view that performatives are “a special class of sentences with peculiar syntactic and pragmatic properties” (1983:231), later, he defines a general category of performative utterances involving “explicit” and “implicit” performatives (Austin 1962:67ff). Further, instead of using the dichotomy performative/constative, Austin proposes “a general theory of illocutionary acts of which the various performatives and constatives are just special sub-class” (1983:231). Thus, Austin defines three kinds of acts in which “saying something is doing something” (Levinson 1983:236): locutionary act, illocutionary act, and, perlocutionary act. It is the second category, the illocutionary act, which is the most important in Austin’s investigation. It has later been termed the “speech act” and used in linguistics to “refer to a theory which analyses the role of utterances in relation to the behaviour of speaker and hearer in interpersonal communication” (Crystal 2003a:427). Austin defined a locutionary act as “uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference” (1962:109). Illocutionary acts are utterances with a “certain (conventional) force”, e.g. informing, ordering, warning, etc. And finally, perlocutionary acts are performed: “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, [...]” (1962:109, emphasis added). Austin’s work was systematized and further developed by J. R. Searle (1969), an American philosopher, who, in relation to speech acts, claims that “all linguistic communication involves linguistic acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word or sentence, [...] but rather the production of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of the speech acts” (Searle 1969:16). Additionally, as Mey puts it, speech acts are produced in “actual situations of language use, by people having something ‘in mind’” and not in the constructed examples of grammarians and philosophers (Mey 2001:93-94). Further, what belongs among the typical features of speech acts is their intentionality (Searle 1969:16). Searle finds Austin’s classification of speech acts inconsistent and incomplete, and that is why he identifies (cf. Searle 1969, 1976) five basic categories of speech acts:
(Levinson 1983:240) Levinson observes that this classification is somewhat problematic because it is not built “in any systematic way on felicity conditions” and it cannot be taken as “definitive or exhaustive” (1983:240). Mey compares Austin’s and Searle’s theories of speech acts and states that Searle’s criticism of Austin is legitimate owing to the insufficiency of his classification and the incompleteness of his theory. “The categories that Austin establishes are not mutually exclusive, as their criteria often overlap” (Mey 2001:124). He also mentions a terminological confusion and insufficient distinction between the terms “speech act” and “speech act verb”. Last but not least, Austin’s definitions of speech acts are too broad. (2001:124). In spite of these problems, Austin’s important discovery that “language is an instrument of action, not just speaking, has not diminished in time” (Mey 2001:124). As regards Searle’s classification, Mey correctly points out that it resembles Austin’s typology. Like Austin, Searle distinguishes five categories of speech acts, however, the reason why his classification is assessed higher is its orientation toward the real world. “Since all acts of speaking perform something in the world, they have an illocutionary character; therefore, the interest of linguists and philosophers should center on those illocutionary aspects of language use, rather than on the somewhat dubious distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts” (Mey 2001:125). When comparing and indicating insufficiencies in Austin’s and Searle’s work, one should not overlook the fact that both of them were philosophers and so certain intentions in their language description may not always seem relevant for linguistic purposes, as Mey rightly emphasises (2001:125). An important topic which is further discussed by Searle is the multiple functions of an utterance. He states that speakers usually express more functions than only one in the same utterance (1976:23-24). “We tell people how the things are, we try to get them to do things, we commit ourselves to doing things, we express our feelings and attitudes and we bring about changes through our utterances” (1976:23). Download 1.35 Mb. Share with your friends:
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