Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape (original) (raw)
Related papers
The many faces of speech act theory — editorial to special issue on speech actions
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2009
Over the past decades speech act theory has evolved in many directions and, as a result, it may be more reasonable to talk about speech act theories than one received model. Most of the contemporary developments explicitly refer to John L. Austin and John Searle as their mentors. However, the (still growing) heritage has been used in a selective way and some of the newer approaches are not mutually compatible. What remains constant through all of them is the focus on language as a type (and means) of action and the underlying belief that communication is composed of linguistic acts. It is also important that these acts are not performed in isolation, but typically, in natural communication, form complex structures. It is, at least partly, the evasive nature of the interplay between the linguistic form used and the context in which it appears that constitutes the puzzle of performativity and illocutionary force.
Speech Act Theory - A Critical Overview
This paper examines J.L. Austin's theory regarding speech acts, or how we do things with words. It starts by reviewing the birth and foundation of speech act theory as it appeared in the 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard before going into what Austin's theory is and how it can be applied to the real world. The theory is explained and analysed both in regards to its faults and advantages. Proposals for the improvement of the theory are then developed, using the ideas of other scholars and theorists along with the ideas of the author. The taxonomy in this essay is vast and various concepts and conditions are introduced and applied to the theory in order for it to work. Those conditions range from being conditions of appropriateness through to general principles of communication. In this essay utterances are examined by their propositional content, the intention of the utterance, and its outcome. By studying how utterances are formed and issued, along with looking into utterance circumstances and sincerity, one can garner a clear glimpse into what constitutes a performative speech act and what does not. By applying the ideas of multiple thinkers in unison it becomes clear that a) any one single theory does not satisfyingly explain all the intricacies of the theory and b) most utterances which are not in the past tense can be considered to be either performative or as having some performative force.
When we speak we can do all sorts of things, from aspirating a consonant, to constructing a relative clause, to insulting a guest, to starting a war. These are all, pre-theoretically, speech acts-acts done in the process of speaking. The theory of speech acts, however, is especially concerned with those acts that are not completely covered under one or more of the major divisions of grammar-phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics-or under some general theory of actions.
A critical look at speech act theory
1977
One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics1 is the idea that a theory of linguistic communication is really only a special case of a general theory of human action. According to this view, the various linguistic subdisciplines such as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics should be regarded as the studies of different abstract aspects of underlying communicative actions.
This paper is intended to give insights to the readers about development of speech act theories which include categories, characteristics, validities, and strategies. The research begins with the classification of speech acts done by some experts and continues with description of characteristics and validities carried out especially by Austin and Searle, and ends with speech act strategies developed by Parker and Riley, using examples taken from Indonesian, Javanese, Balinese, and English, four languages that the writer masters relatively well. Most of Indonesian, Balinese, and Javanese data together with their context are created intuitively as a native or nearly-native speaker while some English utterances are created and the others extracted from pragmatic text books used as references in this study. Research findings show that there are various types of speech acts, and each speech act has its own validity conditions. Among them, illocutionary acts constitute the focal point of pragmatics' studies. The description shows that every expert of pragmatics uses different categories in classifying illocutionary acts, and the kinds of strategies used to express them.
'Speech Acts' (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2017)
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2017
Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.
From Speech Acts to Speech Actions 2013
I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Łódź, Poland, and especially Ewa Waniek*Klimczak, for providing me with stimulating and friendly environment at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics. Finally, I would also like to thank the reviewers of the book. I owe very special thanks to my family for their love, patience and constant support: (in order of appearance in my life) Wisia, Zdzisław, Jacek and Martynka. Austin's lectures, possibly with the exception of the very concept of the actional character of linguistic utterances, has been substantially reaffirmed and retained in further elaborations. Researchers who developed Austin's ideas have been constructing models which are often mutually incompatible, not always true to Austin even in their use of his metalanguage, and much varied in their research perspective. As a result, Austin's original thought seems to have been lost in many of the developments, which is less visible as Austin's own claims were usually tentative in character and, due to his untimely death, he had to leave the original model still in the making. Today, indeed, it may be claimed that, despite the incredibly immense impact over the years, the theory as such does not exist. Although this book does not purport to be a complete account of speech act phenomena, its purpose is to show Austin's original ideas vis*à*vis later developments in speech act theoretic research as well as in the context of earlier reflection on the actional power of language. It is claimed that even now Austin's ideas are still thought*provoking and that the model of speech act theory which can be seen in his approach is quite modern against the background of the newest proposals in the field of twenty*first century linguistics. It is evident that Austin's original ideas are often richer than later elaborations of his concepts and that his work is worth rereading in the context of the linguistics of the twenty*first century. Chapter one presents selected pre*speech act theoretic ideas focused on linguistic action, chapter two discusses Austin's original proposals with comments on selected concepts with reference to some of their modifications in the work of later theorists. Chapter three is devoted to problems related to speech act taxonomies with comments on their possible and actual applications. Chapter four discusses the use of the concept of convention in Austin and in other speech act theoretic models. Finally, chapter five presents new proposals for what may be recognised as a theory of speech action or actions and their relation to Austin's original account. The final section sketches possible future perspectives for speech act theory (or theories). The material to which I am referring, especially beyond Austin's model of speech act theory, is necessarily selective and its aim is to provide illustration for the points in the discussion. Due to immense diversity and richness found in the current speech act*theoretic research, the book does not purport to provide a thorough and balanced description of the field, but attempts to indicate relevance, and, where applicable, also evolution of Austin's ideas. CHAPTER ONE THE CONCEPT OF LANGUAGE AS ACTION IN RETROSPECT This chapter discusses relevant aspects of pre*speech act*theoretic reflections on language perceived as action. The overall motivation for the chapter can be explicated through Gilbert Ryle's words, already popularised by Siobhan Chapman (2008: 2): The wise rambler occasionally, though not incessantly, looks back over his shoulder in order to link up the place he has got to with the country through which he has recently passed. It is equally wise for thinkers occasionally, though not incessantly, to try to fix in retrospect the courses that they have followed and the positions from which they have moved. (Ryle 1956: 1) To what extent such reflections and retrospections have or had been influential in the context of speech act theory is debatable, but the speech*as*action* reflection manifestations definitely belong in the linguistic*philosophical heritage which must have exerted general influence. Thus, the chapter also sketches the environment at the dawn of the theory of speech acts as introduced by John Langshaw Austin with the aim to show the natural perspective on speaking as doing and the motivation which prompted the emergence of the Austinian model in the middle of the twentieth century.