Uzbekistan state world languages university translation faculty the english applied translation department

Issues in Speech Act Theory

Pragmatics is the science of language seen in relation to its users. Language is the chief means of human communication. Various uses of language are governed by the conditions of society, inasmuch as these conditions determine the users’ access to, and control of, their communicative means. Speaking a language is performing speech acts, these include, among others, making statements, giving commands, making requests, making promises, and so on. These acts are in general made possible by, and are performed in accordance with certain rules for the use of linguistic elements. The reason for concentrating on the study of speech acts is simply this: all linguistic communication involves linguistic acts. As Searle puts it, “The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word or sentence but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of the speech act.”
In the 1950’s John Langshaw Austin provided the early underpinnings for the modern theory of speech acts developed subsequently by his student John Rogers Searle. In particular John Searle’s Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of language took up and developed Austin’s account of illocutionary acts, as described in How To Do Things with Words. These philosophers developed their theories in part in opposition to another philosophical school, the Logical Positivists. Logical positivism was developed by a group of philosophers called the Vienna Circle in the 1920’s and 1930’s. According to logical positivists, there are only two sources of real knowledge: logic and empirical observation. Anything else is meaningless conjecture. Logic follows strict rules of proof and tests of internal consistency. For example, the statement I will meet you yesterday is nonsensical and meaningless. We know this without reference to anything other than the meanings of the words. It is illogical, internally inconsistent. The logical positivists would say that we are using analytical knowledge when we analyze the possible meanings of this sentence.
An example of empirically observed knowledge is: At the surface of the earth, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 ms2. This claim can be verified by experiment. This category of knowledge, the logical positivists referred to as synthetic knowledge.
As one can see, the logical positivists accepted only scientific and mathematical knowledge as valid. In their view, any statement which could not be tested either via logic, or via experiment, was meaningless. They called such statements metaphysical. An example of a metaphysical statement (and therefore meaningless in their view) is God exists. Another example: God does not exist. What the logical positivists were doing was privileging scientific language (logic, mathematics) above ordinary natural languages (English, German, etc.)¹¹.
Scientific statements were either true or false, and could be verified to be one or the other. For them natural language is ambiguous and often just a babble of unfounded opinions. Ordinary language was useful for ordinary life but not for serious thought. If this philosophy sounds extreme, it is. But many people with science and engineering backgrounds often hold this philosophy although they probably will not admit it. It rears its head when the so-called ‘hard’ sciences sneer at the ‘soft’ sciences, such as sociology, or at the humanities, such as history or literature. These ‘softer’ subjects cannot meet the austere standards of the logical positivists. But are they therefore without serious meaning?
In this unit, we will look at what happened in the branch of philosophy, with origins in the British tradition of thinking about language, which later on came to be known as Speech Act Theory (SAT). Speech Act Theory was developed by the Oxford philosopher John L. Austin, whose 1955 lectures at Harvard University were published posthumously as How To Do Things With Words in 1962. Austin’s approach has been developed since, and there is now a large literature devoted to the subject. Austin’s work is, in many respects, a reaction to some traditional and influential attitudes to language. We can risk simplifying these as a starting point. The attitudes can be said to involve three related assumptions, as follows:
a) that the basic sentence-type in language is declarative (i.e. a statement or assertion);
b) that the principal use of language is to describe states of affairs (by using statements);
c) that the meaning of utterances can be described in terms of their truth or falsity.
Among Austin’s contemporaries these assumptions were associated with the philosophers known as logical positivists, a term originally applied to the mathematicians and philosophers of the Vienna Circle. An important issue for logical positivist approaches is how far the meaning of a sentence is reducible to its verifiability, i.e. the extent to which, and by which, it can be shown to be true or false. Austin’s¹² opposition to these views is the ‘common-sense’ one that language is used for far more than simply stating the facts and that, for the most part, utterances cannot be said to be either true or false. He makes two important observations. The first is that not all sentences are statements and that much of conversation is made up of questions, exclamations, commands, and expressions of wishes like the examples (ex. 1 – 6) below:
1) Excuse me!
2) Are you serving?
3) Hello!
4) Six pints of stout and a packet of peanuts, please!
5) Give me the dry roasted ones.
6) How much? Are you serious?
Such utterances (ex. 1 – 6) are not descriptions and cannot be said to be true or false.
Austin’s second observation was that even in utterances using the grammatical form of declaratives, not all are used to make statements. Austin identified a subset of declaratives that are not used to make true or false statements, such as in the following examples (taken from Austin):
7) I promise to take a taxi home.
8) I bet you five pounds that he won’t win.
9) I declare this meeting open.
10) I warn you that legal action will ensue.
11) I name this ship “The Flying Dutchman”.
Austin claimed that these utterances contained in themselves a kind of action. Thus by uttering: I promise to take a taxi home a speaker makes a promise rather than just describing one. Austin called this kind of utterance a performative utterance and it can be characterized by the following features:
- the action is performed by the first verb in the sentence,
- the adverb ‘hereby’ can be inserted to stress its function, e.g. I hereby request that you leave my property,
- subject appears in the first person,
- the verb is used in the present indicative active.
We can contrast performative and non-performative (later to be known as constative) utterances by the first two features. A speaker would not, for example, expect the uttering of (12) to constitute the action of cooking a cake. These sentences describe actions independent of the linguistic act. Below we can see the use of ‘hereby’ with these sentences.
12) I cook this cake.
13) I hereby cook this cake.
14) I start this car.
15) I hereby start this car.
In Austin’s terminology a performative that works is called felicitous and one that does not is infelicitous. For them to work, such performatives have to satisfy the social conventions, i.e. we cannot, for example, name a ship by walking up to it in dock and saying I name this ship “The Flying Dutchman”. Less explicitly, there are social conventions governing the giving of orders to co-workers, greeting strangers, etc. Austin’s name for the enabling conditions necessary for a performative is felicity conditions (FCs). In order for us to make it more comprehensible, the following chart can be presented:

UTTERANCES

NON-PERFORMATIVES PERFORMATIVES

(CONSTATIVES) doing something through saying it

saying something