Linguistic action theories of communication (original) (raw)

Philosophy of Language and Action Theory

Romero-Trillo J, (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context. Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95-115., 2023

Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Usually, the plans that motivate such utterances include being understood by others and having an effect on their behavior as a result. The use of language belongs squarely in what Frege called the causal realms, the physical and the mental. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a parta very important partof the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. Charles Morris, in Signs, Language, and Behavior (1946), divided "semiotics," the study of signs, into three parts: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 1 Taking language as a system of signs, pragmatics is the study of how language is used, "how to do things with words," as Austin says. Austin developed his theory of speech acts in the 1950s, and Searle and others have further criticized and developed it (Searle 1985). Speech act theory categorizes and describes actions in terms of what we do to perform them, and what we do in and by performing them. Perhaps by uttering a sentence I say something about a politician (a locutionary act); in saying that, I insult the politician (an illocutionary act); by insulting the politician I annoy his powerful friends (a perlocutionary act), and so on. All of this depends on syntax and semantics to get started, but it is basically pragmatics. A bit later, H. P. Grice (1975) introduced the concept of implicature, which is something conveyed by an utterance beyond the proposition it expresses, We are grateful to the members of the Zoom group of philosophical discussion for their constant inspiration. The first two authors acknowledge two grants, one by the Spanish Government

Philosophy of Language or Speech Acts' Philosophy

Communication to Medellin University Columbia, 2013

In this paper I address the question of the philosophy of language. Not exactly as a philosophy of a faculty – the capacity, for example, to speak a language –; not as a philosophy of a universal structure, or logic, or grammar, that would express itself through all the particular languages that the people speak, but mainly as a practice, a social practice of action and communication. For this, I will build on what is usually called as the Speech Acts Theory. My point is that the philosophy of language, as we usually understand it, at least in the analytic philosophy, grew as a response to a logical and epistemological questioning. Most of the authors that are currently quoted were first concerned with the question of the foundations of science, and in particular of mathematics that they addressed by growing what we call today the modern logic, a highly formalised and mathematized logic that did not exist in Kantian times. In the nineteenth century, however, mathematics not only made a leap forward, asserting themselves as a purely rational science, cutting its last links with empiricism – with intuition, to use Kant concepts – but provided also new ways to think logic and to analyse the inferences’ relations. Logic grew as a powerful tool, so powerful that some philosophers thought it could henceforth absorb – and justify – all the other sciences, including the mathematics themselves. This was the time of logicism. I will try to show, today, that there is an alternative to the philosophy of language, which is usually known under the name of “Speech Acts Theory”. This theory, which was put forward by John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) and by John Roger Searle (1932 - ), sees language as a social and communication practice, that requires to be considered as such. I will introduce it briefly and discuss some of its main thesis. I do not aim to present here a comprehensive view of all the concepts proposed by Austin and Searle. But I would like to highlight at least the main differences between the philosophy of language and the speech acts theory. I hope that, by doing so, I will also be able to show you that this theory opens new ways to understand the language and could be a genuine alternative to the philosophy of language.

A critical look at speech act theory

1977

Speech acts and the autonomy of linguistic pragmatics

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2009

This paper comments on selected problems of the definition of linguistic pragmatics with a focus on notions associated with speech act theory in the tradition of John Langshaw Austin. In more detail it concentrates on the (ir)relevance of the use of the Austinian categorisation into locution, illocution, and perlocution in locating a divide in between pragmatics and semantics, and especially the distinction between the locutionary act and the illocutionary act and its implications for the definition of pragmatics and its separation from the semantic theory. The relation between form and meaning is further briefly reviewed against dichotomies including the Gricean and neo-Gricean 'what is said' versus 'what is implicated' or meant, between what can be 'locuted', but not said, and what can be said, but not asserted. These dichotomies are related to the theoretical commitments as to the accepted operative forces in speech acts, primarily convention and intention. It is suggested that, roughly, the development of the speech act theory can be viewed as a process by which the theory moves away from its originally sociolinguistic orientation towards a more psychologistic account, which in turn leads towards diminishing the role of (traditional) semantics and the subsequent juxtaposition of pragmatics and syntax rather than pragmatics and semantics.

A CRITICAL LOOK AT SPEECH ACT THEORYREFERENCES

One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics 1 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. Explanation of variation within each subdiscipline should preferably be functional, i.e. it should relate the properties of the phenomenon being examined to the function of a communicative action as a whole. If this task could be accomplished, the functionalist claim is that linguistic theory would simultaneously achieve both increased exhaustiveness and greater internal coherence and simplicity.

SPEECH ACTS IN PRAGMATICS

2021

Speech act is a study that is more likely to learn about the meaning of sentences and not a theory that is more concerned with analyzing sentence structure in communication. In addition, speech acts means theory that learn and studies about the meaning of language which is based on the relationship between speech and actions taken by the speaker to his speech partners in communicating so that the goals and intentions conveyed can be interpreted correctly. Speech act is an act of human communication that progress by the speaker's ability in dealing with act or certain situations. A speech that is delivered is only meaningful and is called a speech act if it is realized in a real communication.

Linguistic action theories of communication (original) (raw)

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