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Speech Acts Lecture 8
Introduction • The theory of speech acts emerged in the 1930’s. The basic claim was that a sentence is meaningful if it can be verified, that is, if it can be objectively assessed for its truth or falsity. In this vein, truth-conditional semantics viewed sentences as describing states of affairs correctly or in correctly. If the descriptions were correct, the sentences were true and, if not, they were false.
Introduction • Attractive as this approach initially appeared to be for the study of linguistic meaning, it soon became apparent that it could account neither for the meaning of statements about aesthetic merit or moral values, nor for a great number of everyday expressions that people use in communication.
Introduction • It was pointed out by Austin in a series of lectures that many declarative sentences of English are not used to make true or false statements. • In a truth-conditional approach, these sentences should be considered meaningless since they cannot be assessed for truth or falsity. However, such sentences are understood as meaningful.
Introduction • (1) I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow. • (2) I apologize. • (3) I sentence you to ten years of hard labour. • (4) I give my word. • These sentences are not used to describe some states of affairs, but to do certain things: to bet, to apologize, to pass sentence, and to promise, respectively. Because these acts are performed through speech, Austin called them speech acts.
Introduction • Since speech act theory relates to the use of sentences in communication, it legitimately falls within the area of pragmatics. • If certain utterances count as acts, then an issue arises concerning the agents of those acts, their motivation and intentions to perform them, and the sociocultural setting in which they do so. • The question arises as to whether and how institutions define the performance of speech acts.
Introduction • For example, the utterance in (3) can actually change the world for a person if it is uttered according to institutional law, by a judge in a courtroom. In this sense, the speaker of (3) is socially constructed by her discourse within the particular institution. It follows that the specification of whatever conditions must hold for the successful performance of these acts must be part of the theory.
Introduction • Even though speech acts may be performed by the use of appropriate speech act verbs, they may also be performed in the absence of such verbs in conventionally predictable and unpredictable ways. • (5) I will be there on time. • (6) I’m coming over at the weekend.
Introduction • (5) expresses a promise. In the absence of such an overt marker of the speech act, there are other grammatical features that allow the particular speech act interpretation, such as the deictic reference to the speaker I and the future marking with “will” of the act itself. • In (6), apart from deictic speaker reference, there are no other overt indicators of what kind of speech act is being performed.
Introduction • Several options are possible, including (a) an announcement of a future state of affairs, (b) a promise, ( c) a warning, or even (d) a threat. • Austin claims that in making an utterance a speaker also performs certain actions, or does things with her words, which are characterized by a specific force. These actions consist of three types of linguistic acts:
Introduction • The illocutionary act (i.e. the act of saying something) • The illocutionary act (i.e. the act performed in saying something by means of some kind of conventional force associated with it either explicitly or implicitly) • The perlocutionary act (i.e. the act of producing certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons, possibly done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing it)
Introduction • Locution: He said to me ‘Shoot her!’ meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and referring by ‘her’ to her. • Illocution: He urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her. • Perlocution: He persuaded me shoot her, or he got me (or made me, etc.) to shoot her.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Speech act theory has been criticized for its inability to handle issues of sociocultural diversity on the one hand, on the other, to account for the interactive and collaborative character of speech acts in general. • (7) I’ll sleep on the floor. • (8) The news is about to start.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Their illocutionary force could vary depending not only on situation context, but also on how these utterances were treated by the addressee. • If (7) is followed by (9) and (10) • (9) it might not be necessary. • (10) Thanks, that’s very kind. • It is reasonable to assume that (7) stands for a prediction if answered by (9), and for an offer if followed by (10).
Speech Acts and Cognition • The level of indeterminacy in assigning illocutionary force to (7) is lower when the responses in (9) and (10) are provided than if they are not, but to remove indeterminacy completely, if at all possible, one would have to look at the wider situational context. • The specification of the illocutionary force in (8) relies partly on how the addressee chooses to respond to it. • The interactional aspect of linguistic meaning has long been identified in relation to language understanding, conversational analysis, and at the level of second language teaching.
Speech Acts and Cognition • From an experiential point of view, an empirically based cognitive model of speech acts is essentially interactional in taking into account the response of the addressee. • The structure of major sentence types reflects a conceptualization of a complex system of speaker-addressee interaction and leads to the construction of the common-sense, cognitive model of speech acts.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Speech acts cannot be studied independently of the social contexts in which they occur or regardless of the interactional basis of communication. • An important analysis of speech acts is how they come to be understood in the way they are within sociocultural frames of knowledge.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Speech acts are understood in terms of an idealized cognitive model that is socioculturally determined. • Action scenes evoke and are evoked by lexical frames which may either in themselves perform a speech act, or merely describe it. The former lexical frames are commonly called speech act verbs. These speech act verbs are space-builders in that they create a space in which a proposition is inscribed.
Speech Acts and Cognition • In the absence of speech act verbs, an utterance may be relativized to such a space in terms of an institutionally determined speech situation and the role of the interlocutors in it. In this case, the situation sets up this space pragmatically. • Speech acts are both utterances and actions. • These action can only be performed by utterances – otherwise they are acts and not speech acts.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Both speaker and addressee are social beings and therefore the acts they engage in are not only socioculturally constrained, but also identifiable as such in terms of sociocultural and/or linguistic convention. • It is part of human experience that in verbal communication people use language in order to do certain things in a way that resembles the use of their physical apparatus and objects in their physical environment to do other things and cause particular effects in this environment.
Speech Acts and Cognition • The human conceptualisation of speech acts is reflected in a particular ICM which is defined as follows: • The ICM of speech acts concerns utterances as crucially associated with action. • The propositional content that characterizes this ICM reflects their dual nature: first there is an agent perfoming an action which affects a state of affairs so that the addressee’s role is established in a particular way which such a state of affairs by socioculturally and linguistic convention.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Second, there is a speaker verbally communicating with an addressee within the framework of socioculturally defined goals of interaction. • Thus, the ICM of the speech act is at the same time a model of acting and a model of speaking. • According to ICM, speech acts affect or change an existing state of affairs, they correspond to experience that the human mind would naturally seek to establish in terms of lexical category.
Speech Acts and Cognition • Thus, these actions constitute experiential scenes that evoke and are evoked by lexical frames that either constitute or reflect the acitons. Both verbs constituting actions (such as sentence, bet, apologize, etc.) evoke socioculturally determined scenes of experience • Speech acts may be considered frames in that they have a conventional nature and organizing principle that affect our world knowledge. Speech acts are integral part of social interaction.
Speech Acts and Cognition • I sentence you to ten years of hard labour. • At the utterance level, the verb sentence is a lexical frame evoking a scene of experience whereby an agent performs an institutional act, that of sentencing, which affects the existing state of affairs in a way that dramatically contributes to the social role of the addressee by conferring upon him agency for future, prescribed action.
