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

3. Perlocutionary act – is concerned with what follows an utterance: the effect or ‘take-up’ of an illocutionary act. As Levinson puts it “the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance”. This is also generally known as the perlocutionary effect¹⁴.
Austin gave the example of sentences like Shoot her! In appropriate circumstances this sentence can have the illocutionary force of ordering, urging or advising the addressee to shoot her, but the perlocutionary force of persuading, forcing, frightening, etc. the addressee into shooting her. Perlocutionary effects are less conventionally tied to linguistic forms and so have been of less interest to linguists. We know, for example, that people can recognize orders without obeying them. Furthermore, the locutionary act can be analysed into:
1. Phonetic act – the act of uttering certain noises
1. Phatic act – the act of uttering certain words
1. Rhetic act – the act of using words with some sense
To sum up, Austin’s classification of linguistic acts may be presented in the following way:
Act 1. Locution
He said to me: You can’t do that.
Act 2. Illocution
He protested against my doing it.
Act 3. Perlocution
He pulled me up, checked me.
Searle’s classification of Speech Acts. Since Austin’s original explorations of SAT there have been a number of works which attempt to systematize the approach. In particular, scholars have focused on the classification of possible types of speech acts. John R. Searle, an American philosopher, linguist and student of Austin, was chiefly preoccupied with examining illocutionary acts, devoting a lot of attention to their systematization and providing his own taxonomy of illocutionary speech acts.
Searle not only presents the reader with those aspects of SAT defined by his teacher, but also draws constructive criticism of it. He points out that “(…) there is a persistent confusion between verbs and acts, not all the verbs are illocutionary verbs, there is too much overlap of the categories, too much heterogeneity within the categories, many of the verbs listed in the categories don’t satisfy the definition given for the category and, most important, there is no consistent principle of classification.”¹⁵
In addition, he develops his own taxonomy of illocutionary acts, specifying the rules by which we are able to distinguish one illocutionary act from another. In his “A classification of illocutionary acts”, Searle suggests twelve criteria which are crucial in differentiating illocutionary acts; they are as follows:
1. Illocutionary point. This is the attempt to make the addressee do something (when ordering), or in the case of a negative order, to make somebody stop doing something. The illocutionary point of a descriptive speech act would be that of representing reality. Considering two different speech acts: an ‘order’ and a ‘request’, having the same point, are distinguished by a difference in illocutionary force.
2. Direction of ‘fit’. This deals with the relation between the word (language) and the world (reality). The fit can have one of two directions:
• getting the words to match the world, e.g. assertions (so called word-to world direction of fit). In this case language is ‘fitted to’, or even ‘fit for’, the environment, as when describing a piece of scenery;
• getting the world to match the words, e.g. promising, requests (world-to word direction of fit). Here, the world is ‘fitted’ to words, i.e. through the use of words, we make the world fit our language.
3. Expressed psychological state. The speaker expresses some attitude or state of mind by means of uttering the illocutionary act. A person cannot usually express a psychological state using a speech act (e.g. believing) without being in that particular psychological state.
4. Force. This may be described as the speaker’s involvement in what is uttered. If we compare, for instance, these two sentences I suggest that we go home now and I insist that we go home now, obviously a difference in their illocutionary force exists.
5. Social status. Any utterance must be placed within the context of the speaker‘s and hearer’s status in society in order to be properly understood.