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

true false felicitous infelicitous
(happy) (unhappy)
Having examined the social conventions that support performatives, it is clear that performatives range from those which are highly institutionalized or even ceremonial requiring sophisticated and overt support, (such as the example of a judge pronouncing a sentence) to less formal acts like warning, thanking, etc. To describe the role of felicity conditions, Austin presented a very general schema:
A. There exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
B. The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and completely.
C. Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the party of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.
If the speech act is unsuccessful through failing to fulfill the (A) or (B) conditions above, then Austin describes it as a misfire. If the act is insincerely performed (violation of condition C), then it is an abuse of a speech act, as for example saying I bet ... with no intention to pay, or I promise ... when we have already intended to break the promise. Linguists, as opposed to philosophers, have tended not to be so interested in this second type of infelicity, since the primary speech act has, in these cases, been successfully communicated. The following kinds of misfires can be identified:
- misinvocations appear when there is no such procedure, or because the procedure in question cannot be made to apply in the way attempted;
- misapplications where the procedure does exist all right but cannot be applied as purported;
- misexecutions the purported act is vitiated by a flaw or hitch in the conduct ceremony.
To illustrate, let’s observe those violations of speech acts occurring in everyday life situations. For instance, assume that a British citizen says to his wife:
I hereby divorce you. He will not thereby get a divorce, because no such procedure exists (as in A whereby merely by saying I hereby divorce you divorce can be achieved. As an example of a failure of condition A, consider a priest baptizing the wrong baby, or the right baby with the wrong name. As far as condition B is concerned, the words uttered have to be the conventionally correct ones. During a marriage ceremony, if the bridegroom’s response to Wilt thou have this woman tothy wedded wife ... so long as ye both shall live? is Yes, it will not do in the Church of England. The bridegroom has to say I will. Next, the procedure must be complete as required by B: if a sentence I bet you six pounds that Mary will come tonight was uttered, and then there was no satisfactory uptake (no-one would say e.g. O.K. I’m on or I’ll go for it), in this case a bet simply fails to come off. Finally, violations of the C conditions are insincerities: for a juror to find a defendant guilty when he knows him to be innocent would be to violate condition C; and promising to do something without the intention of doing it, would be a violation of C.
Looking at the earlier examples of performative utterances, we can say that they are characterized by the following features:
- begin with a first person subject ‘I’,
- are indicative active utterances in the simple present,
- contain a second person – object ‘you’, e.g. I promise you…, I warn you …, etc.
- contain the performative verb as the main verb, for example: promise, warn, sentence, name, bet, pronounce.
Generally, performative nature of these utterances can be emphasized by inserting the adverb ‘hereby’, as described ear earlier, thus I hereby sentence you to... .
Utterances with these characteristics can be called explicit performatives. The importance of SAT lies in the way that Austin and others managed to extend their analysis from these explicit performatives to other utterances. The first step was to point out that in some cases the same speech act seems to be performed but with a relaxation of some of the special characteristics mentioned above. We regularly meet utterances like those below (ex. 16 – 19), where this is so:
You are (hereby) charged with treason.
Passengers are requested to avoid jumping out of the aircraft.
Five pounds says he doesn't make the semi-final.
Come up and see me sometime.
The aforementioned sentences (ex. 16 – 19) can be easily replaced by the corresponding explicit performatives (ex. 16a – 19a), as below:
16a) I (hereby) charge you with treason.
17a) We request that passengers avoid jumping out of the aircraft.
18 a) I bet you five pounds that he doesn't make the semi-final.
19 a) I invite you to come up and see me sometime.
It seems reasonable to say that the sentences (ex. 16 – 19) could be uttered in order to perform the same speech acts as those in (ex. 16a – 19a). In fact, it seems that none of the special characteristics of performative utterances is indispensable to their performance. How then do we recognize these other performatives, which we can call implicit performatives? Answers to this have varied somewhat in the development of the theory but Austin’s original contention was that it was an utterance’s ability to be expanded to an explicit performative that identified it as a performative utterance. Austin discussed at length the various linguistic means by which more implicit performatives could be marked, including the mood of the verb, auxiliary verbs, intonation, etc.
Later on in his work, Austin came to the conclusion that all utterances not only bear a certain meaning, but also “perform specific actions through having specific forces.”¹³ On any occasion, the action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts:
1. Locutionary act – “the basic act of utterance, or producing a meaningful linguistic expression” in other words, the act of saying something that makes sense in a language, i.e. follows the rules of pronunciation and grammar.
2. Illocutionary act – the action intended by the speaker; an utterance which is formed with some kind of function in mind. The illocutionary act is performed through the communicative force of an utterance. It is the making of a statement, an offer, an explanation etc. This is also known as the illocutionary force of the sentence. This is what Austin and his successors have mainly been concerned with: the uses to which language can be put in society. In fact, the term ‘speech acts’ is often used with just this meaning of illocutionary acts.