Halyna D. Malyk Speech Acts and Events

Speech act words are really extremely important in the world of human action and interaction. The set of speech act verbs reflects a certain interpretation of this world. To understand an English-speaking society and to have access to its culture one has to understand this interpretation. There are kinds of speech acts for which English has no names. But the categories for which english does provide names are evidently particularly important. They shape their perception of human attitudes and human relations. They reflect their perceptions and they organize them. It is crucially important to understand what these "names" mean.

The primary function of speech act verbs consists in interpreting people's speech acts, not in performing speech acts. In normal interaction, we don't need speech act verbs to make clear the nature of the speech acts which we wish to perform. When we perform speech acts, we express, directly, first person attitudes. When we interpret other people's speech acts, we attribute to them indirectly, certain first person attitudes. In explicating speech act verbs in a first person format we are modelling the attitudes conveyed in first person expressions (I/we warn you) or attributed to the speakers, rightly or wrongly, in the third person reports.

All illocutionary verbs indispensibly possess two semes:

1. 
   the seme of locution (speaking) which consists ofthe seme of the utterance act and the seme of propositional act (Searle 1969:23)
   
2. 
   the seme of illocution.
   

There are also delocutionary verbs characterizing peculiarity of speaking itself: to bawl for smth., to whisper, to shout, etc.

Many speech act verbs can be used performatively, i.e. when used in the first person, present tense, they indicate the nature (illocutionary force) of the utterance.