There are all sorts of things
we can do with words. We can make statements, requests, ask questions, give
orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies, and so on.
In his famous work, How to
do Things with Words 1953), J. L. Austin outlined his Theory of Speech Acts
and the concept of performative language, in which to say something is to do
something.
To make the statement “I
promise that p” (in which p is the propositional content of the
utterance) is to perform the act of promising as opposed to making a
statement that may be judged true or false.
Performatives cannot be true
or false, only felicitous or infelicitous.
Austin creates a clear
distinction between performatives and constantives, statements that attempt to
describe reality and can be judged true or false.
But he eventually comes to the
conclusion that most utterances are performative in nature.
That is, the speaker is nearly
always doing something by saying something.
For Austin, what the speaker is doing is creating
social realities within certain social contexts.
For example, using an explicit
performative, to say “I now pronounce you man and wife” in the context of a
wedding, in which one is marrying two people, is to create a social reality,
i.e. in this case a married couple.
Austin
described three characteristics, or acts, of statements that begin with the
building blocks of words and end with the effects those words have on an
audience.
Locutionary acts: “roughly
equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain ‘meaning´ in the
traditional sense.”
Illocutionary acts: “such as
informing, ordering, warning,etc., i.e. utterances which have a certain
(conventional) force.”
Perlocutionary acts: “what we
bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading,
deterring or surprising”.
Austin focused on
illocutionary acts, maintaining that here we might find the “force” of a
statement and demonstrate its performative nature.
For example, to say “Don´t run
with scissors” has the force of a warning when spoken in a certain context.
This utterance may also be
stated in an explicitly performative way, e.g., “I warn you, don´t run with
scissors.”
This statement is neither true
nor false. It creates a warning. By hearing the statement, and understanding it
as a warning, the hearer is warned, which is not to say that s/he must or will
act in any particular way regarding the warning.
Austin maintained that
once “we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing
of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a
possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act”.
This conclusion expresses his
belief that studying words or sentences (locutionary acts) outside of a social
context tells us little about communication (illocutionary acts) or its effect
on an audience (perlocutionary acts).
John Searle, who continued Austin’s theory, claims
the illocutionary act is “the minimal complete unit of human linguistic
communication. Whenever we talk or write to each other, we are performing
illocutionary acts”. Illocutionary acts are performed with intentionality.
Also according to Bach and
Harnish, people “don´t speak merely to exercise their vocal cords.” Some reason
always exists, and this reason is called the communicative presumption:
the mutual belief that whenever one person says something to another, the
speaker intends to perform an illocutionary act.
In fact, almost any speech act
is the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects
of the speaker's intention:
there is the act of saying
something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how
one is trying to affect one's audience.
In general, speech acts are
acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the
type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being
expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a
desire, and an apology expresses a regret.
As an act of communication, a
speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the
speaker's intention, the attitude being expressed.
Some speech acts, however, are
not primarily acts of communication and have the function of affecting
institutional states of affairs. They can do so in either of two ways. Some
officially judge something to be the case, and othersactually make
something the case.
Those of the first kind
include judges' rulings, referees' decisions etc, and the latter include firing,
appointing etc. Acts of both kinds can be performed only in certain ways under
certain circumstances by those in certain institutional or social positions.
The theory of speech acts aims
to do justice to the fact that even though words (phrases, sentences) encode
information, people do more things with words than convey information, and that
when people do convey information, they often convey more than their words
encode.
Although the focus of Speech
Act Theory has been on utterances, especially those made in conversational
and other face-to-face situations, the phrase 'speech act' should be taken as a
generic term for any sort of language use, oral or otherwise.
Speech acts, whatever the
medium of their performance, fall under the broad category of intentional
action, with which they share certain general features.
An especially pertinent
feature is that when one acts intentionally, generally one has a set of nested
intentions.
For instance, having arrived
home without one's keys, one might push a button with the intention not just of
pushing the button but of ringing a bell, arousing one's spouse and,
ultimately, getting into one's house.
The single bodily movement
involved in pushing the button comprises a multiplicity of actions, each
corresponding to a different one of the nested intentions.
Or suppose, for example, that
a bartender utters the words, 'The bar will be closed in five minutes‘.He is thereby performing the locutionary
act of saying that the bar will be closed in five minutes (from the moment
he’s speaking).
In saying this, the bartender
is also performing the illocutionary act of informing the patrons of the
bar's imminent closing and perhaps the act of urging them to order a last
drink.
In fact, the bartender intends
to be performing the perlocutionary act of causing the patrons to
believe that the bar is about to close and of getting them to order one last
drink. He is performing all these speech acts just by uttering certain words.
There seems to be a direct
relationship in this example between the words uttered ('The bar will be closed
in five minutes'), what is thereby said, and the act of informing the patrons
that the bar will close in five minutes.
Less direct is the connection
between the utterance and the act of urging the patrons to order one last
drink. Clearly there is no linguistic connection here, for the words make no
mention of drinks or of ordering. This indirect connection is inferential.
There is a similarly indirect
connection when an utterance of 'It's getting cold in here' is made not merely
as a statement about the temperature but as a request to close the window or as
a proposal to go some place warmer. Whether it is intended (and is taken) as a
request or as a proposal depends on contextual information.
The examples considered thus
far suggest that performing a speech act, in particular an illocutionary act,
is a matter of having a certain communicative intention in uttering certain
words. Such an act succeeds, if the audience recognizes that intention.
This is not by magic, of
course. One must choose one's words in such a way that their utterance makes
one's intention recognizable.
However, as illustrated above, the utterance
need not encode one's intention. So, in general, understanding an
utterance is not merely a matter of decoding it.
Austin did not take into
account the central role of speakers' intentions and hearers' inferences.
He supposed that the
successful performance of an illocutionary act is a matter of convention, not
intention.
Indeed, he held that the use
of a sentence with a certain illocutionary force is conventional in the
peculiar sense that this force can be 'made explicit by the performative
formula'
In making this claim Austin was overly
impressed by the special case of utterances that affect institutional states of
affairs, and perhaps should have not taken them as a model of illocutionary
acts in general.
Austin was especially
struck by the character of explicit performative utterances, in which one uses
a verb that names the very type of act one is performing.
For them he developed an
account of what it takes for such acts to be performed successfully and
felicitously, classifying the various things that can go wrong as
“infelicities”
Felicity Conditions
There must exist an accepted
conventional procedure having a conventional effect, that includes the uttering
of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.
The particular persons and
circumstances in the given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the
particular procedure.
The procedure must be executed
by all participants both correctly and completely.
Where the procedure is
designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings or for the
inauguration of a certain consequential conduct, then participants must have
those thoughts or feelings, must intend so to conduct themselves, and must
actually so conduct themselves subsequently.
How can a performative ‘go
wrong’?
I christen this ship the
H.S.M.Flounder
There’s not a ship in sight
The ship has a name already
I don’t have the authority
This name is not allowed
It’s the wrong formula
It’s not the right moment
But it is only in certain
conventionally designated circumstances and by people in certain positions that
certain utterances can have the force they do. For example, only in certain
circumstances does a jury foreman's pronouncement of 'Guilty' or 'Not guilty'
count as a verdict.
In these cases it is only by
conforming to a convention that an utterance of a certain form counts as the
performance of an act of a certain sort. However, most illocutionary acts
succeed not by conformity to convention but by recognition of intention.
They are not conventional
except in the irrelevant sense that the words and sentences being used have
their linguistic meanings by virtue of convention.
This raises a serious problem
for the theories inspired by Austin's
view. Consider, for example, the theory advanced by John Searle, who proposes
to explain illocutionary forces by means of 'constitutive rules' (conventions)
for using 'force-indicating' devices, such as performative verbs or certain
verb moods.
The problem is that the same
sorts of illocutionary acts that can be performed by means of such devices can
be performed without them. For example, one does not have to use a
performative, as in 'I demand that you be quiet', or the imperative mood, as in
'Be quiet!', to ask someone to be quiet.
Clearly a theory that relies
on rules for using such devices is not equipped to explain the illocutionary
forces of utterances lacking such devices.
No such difficulty arises for
a theory according to which most illocutionary acts are performed not with an
intention to conform to a convention but with a communicative intention.
Types of Speech Acts
Statements, requests, promises
and apologies are examples of the four major categories of communicative
illocutionary acts:
constatives,
directives,
commissives and
acknowledgments.
This is the nomenclature used
by Kent Bach and Michael Harnish, who develop a detailed taxonomy in which each
type of illocutionary act is defined by the type of attitude expressed (in some
cases there are constraints on the content as well).
There is no generally accepted
terminology here, and Bach and Harnish borrow the terms 'constative' and
'commissive' from Austin
and 'directive' from Searle.
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