SPEECH ACT THEORY

31.01.2022
John Austin John Searle Paul Grice

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Meaning
❖ The whole is greater than the sum of the parts; Generation of meaning in the
context of Language
❖ In the history of humankind, the concept of ‘meaning’ has been important for
several disciplines. It is a crucial aspect that adds immense value to anything
that we do as human beings.
■ Literary Criticism
■ Anthropology
■ Philosophy
■ Linguistics

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Logical Positivism, the Precursor
● Verificationist Theory of Meaning
● In the 1920s and 30s there were a group of philosophers and mathematicians
in Vienna and Berlin who propounded the doctrine of Logical Positivism.
● They claimed that a sentence is meaningless unless its truth conditions can
be tested, that is to say, unless formal logical analyses of this sentence can
answer the question under what conditions it is true or false.
● Sentences must be verifiable in order to be meaningful.
○ What were the implications of such a formal and constrained view?
○ What was the response to it?

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John Austin’s Speech Act Theory
● Austin developed his speech act theory in his 12 William James Lectures
which he delivered at Harvard University in 1955.
● These were posthumously published in his booklet How to Do Things with
Words (Austin 1962).
● Utterances of all kinds should be considered as Acts
● Utterances that say vs utterances that do; Constatives and Performatives

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The Dichotomy of Constatives and Performatives
● Constatives
○ My daughter’s name is Frauke and my son is called Sebastian
○ We live in a small provincial town to the north of Berlin
○ Eating vegetables is good for your health.
○ ..
● Performatives:
○ I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth
○ I bet you six pence Fury, the black stallion, will win the race.
○ By the powers vested in me…… I pronounce you husband and wife
○ You are under arrest
○ ..

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True or False vs Felicitous or Infelicitous
● A crucial, non-trivial departure from the precursor, proposed by Austin.
● Distinction made between Constatives and Performatives

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Felicity Conditions
A. (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect.
(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in
the procedure.

B. The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely.

C. (i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as
specified in the procedure, and

(ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must so do.

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Felicity Conditions; the Application
● (i) Assume there is a married couple and both are Christians. If the husband
says to his wife ‘I hereby divorce you’ repeating this utterance three times
he will not achieve a divorce; however, with a Muslim couple such an action
would constitute a divorce
○ (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional
effect.

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(ii) Assume a clergyman baptizing a baby ‘Albert’ instead of ‘Alfred’

The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in the

procedure.

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Assume a man says ‘my house’ when he actually has two
Or
‘I bet the race won’t be run today’ when more than one race was arranged
And the context is not informative in either case

B. The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely.

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C. (i) Assume somebody is asked for advice and he intentionally gives bad
advice.

(ii) Assume somebody promises something without any intention whatsoever to

keep the promise

(i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions,
as specified in the procedure, and

(ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must

so do.

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Misfires and Abuses
● Not all instances of infelicitous outcomes are treated in the same manner.
● A and B are misfires
● C is categorised as Abuses

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Felicity Conditions: Questions
A. (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect.
(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in
the procedure.

B. The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely.

C. (i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as
specified in the procedure, and

(ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must so do.

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Which felicity condition(s) is/are violated in each example?
● A person who is not licensed to perform weddings officiates a marriage
● You had borrowed some money from your friend and they are now asking you
to pay it back. You promise them that you will do it the next day, but as of the
time when this conversation took place you are not aware of any source of
such money.
● The President of the International Olympic Committee has to declare the
games open. But they get the name of the host city wrong in the declaration.

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Constatives and Felicity conditions
● Constatives are also affected by felicity conditions. They are not completely
immune to such questioning.
● For instance, ‘statements which refer to something which does not exist’
○ The cat is on the mat but I do not believe it is.
■ The intention of the speaker seems to be misleading
○ All Jack’s children are bald.
■ Presupposes that Jack has children. If that is found to be false, then the utterance is
vacuous.
● Underlying notions of sincerity, commitment and presupposition.

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Twist in the Tale
● If performatives and constatives are conditioned by the same underlying
principles of sincerity, commitment and presupposition, they have a ‘common
underlying structure’.
● Performatives and constatives are not as distinct from each other as was
thought to be.
● The demarcation between utterances that say and those that do appears to
be very superficial then.

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Evidence against distinguishing between constatives and performatives

● Does the intrinsic composition of both distinguish between the two?

● Austin revised his own formulation to say that the utterance by itself is
insufficient to put it in a category; the total situation needs to be assessed.
● The importance of Context
■ It is yours
● Performative verbs: Does it warrant a special category?
■ You are under arrest
● We notice the ‘shift from the dichotomy performative/constative to a general
theory of illocutionary acts of which the various performatives and constatives
are just special sub-cases.

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Proof by Contradiction
So, ‘How to Do Things with Words’ appears as a complex argument in support of
the claim that all speech should be considered as action, and, more
specifically, that speech can be described as the performing of actions of the
same kind as those performed by means of performative utterances. This
complex argument has the form of a proof by contradiction. The thesis
proposed at the beginning is the opposite of the intended one and its refutation
serves as a proof of the intended thesis.

(Sbisà 2007: 462f.)

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Utterances which say something, do something, and produce effects

Locutionary

Illocutionary

Perlocutionary

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Locutionary Act: Saying something
● For Austin saying something is:
○ to perform a ‘phonetic’ act (the act of uttering certain noises);
○ to perform a ‘phatic’ act (the act of uttering certain words in a certain grammatical
construction);
○ to perform a ‘rhetic’ act (the act of using words with a certain meaning).

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Illocutionary Acts: Saying something in doing something
● Locutionary acts are also and at the same time illocutionary acts, i.e. acts of
doing something in saying something like
○ Accusing
○ asking
○ answering questions
○ apologizing
○ blaming
○ informing
○ ordering
○ Assuring
○ warning,
○ making an appointment
○ Promising

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Perlocutionary Acts: doing something by saying something
● These are acts of doing something by saying something like
○ persuading,
○ alerting
○ convincing
○ deterring
○ surprising
○ getting somebody to do something.
● These acts tend to produce an effect or a consequence

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Thus, a locutionary act (which includes the phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts) just
means saying something meaningful in its normal sense. The performance of this
locutionary act involves an illocutionary act which has a certain force (like, for
example, urging, advising, ordering, forcing, etc.). And the achieved effect of
this illocutionary act on the listener (which has consequences for him or her) is
the perlocutionary act.

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● It is nice to have a clean room.
● You need to clean your room today.
● If you don’t clean your room today, you cannot have your friends over.

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Illocutionary acts versus perlocutionary acts : Effects
● An illocutionary act may or may not have an effect on the hearer / audience.
○ When you assure someone, they choose their response to it
● A perlocutionary on the other hand, intrinsically implies a response.
○ These effects have psychological and/or behavioural consequences for the participants
■ A threat
● However, Austin himself concedes (especially in his tenth lecture) that
despite all his efforts to characterize the difference between illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts it turns out to be quite difficult to distinguish them clearly.
● Context is again vital:
○ Direction of a ‘threat’; Superior to subordinate vs subordinate to superior.

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JOHN SEARLE’S SPEECH ACT THEORY
● Searle points out that ‘the basic unit of human linguistic communication is
the illocutionary act’ in the form of a ‘complete sentence’ produced under
specific conditions (Searle 1976: 1; see also 1965 (1972)8: 137; 1969: 25).
Illocutionary acts have an ‘effect’ on the hearer; the hearer understands the
speaker’s utterance.

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● For Searle speaking is performing illocutionary acts in a rule-governed form of
behaviour. These rules are either regulative and can be paraphrased as
imperatives, or they are constitutive and create and define new forms of
behaviour.
● Constitutive rules are similar to Austin’s Felicity Conditions.
● According to him, illocutionary acts are acts that are performed based on the
constitutive rules.

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The Idea of Proposition
● Will John leave the room? - A question
● John will leave the room. - An assertion about the future, a prediction
● John, leave the room! - An order
● Would that John left the room. - Expression of a wish
● If John leaves the room, I do too. - Hypothetical intention
○ What is a proposition?
○ A propositional act: Expressing a proposition in reference to a predicate
● Word order, stress, intonation contour and punctuation are devices with which
a hearer deduces the illocutionary force of a utterer.

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Conditions on Illocutionary Acts
1. The utterance is produced in such a way that the hearer understands what
the speaker says.
2. The speaker makes the promise by uttering the sentence which is directed
towards the hearer. Searle elaborates on this condition as follows: ‘This
condition isolates the propositional content from the rest of the speech act
and enables us to concentrate on the peculiarities of promising in the rest of
the analysis’.
3. The speaker makes a promise. This promise may refer to something he or
she may or may not do in the future once or repeatedly, or it may refer to
remaining ‘in a certain state or condition’. Searle calls conditions (2) and (3)
‘the propositional content conditions’

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4. The hearer prefers that the speaker does something, and the speaker
believes that this is true

5. The speech act to be performed ‘must have a point’. Searle elaborates on

this condition by pointing out that there is no point in promising something that
one will do anyhow.

He refers to conditions (4) and (5) as ‘preparatory conditions’.

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6. The speaker will keep his or her promise. This is what Searle calls the
‘sincerity condition’ of the illocutionary act of sincere promising.

7. The speaker who makes the promise feels obliged to keep it. For Searle this
is the ‘essential condition’ of the illocutionary act of sincere promising.

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8. The speaker wants to convince the hearer that the promise made is meant
seriously.

9. The promise is produced in a grammatically and semantically adequate way in

a situation in which the other eight conditions prevail.

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Searle’s Conditions summarized
● Propositional content rules “specify what kind of propositional content the
speech act is to have”, i.e. what the speech act is about.
● Preparatory condition rules “specify contextual requirements (especially
regarding the speaker’s and the hearer’s epistemic and volitional states)”, i.e.
the necessary prerequisites for the speech act.
● Sincerity condition rules specify “which psychological state of the speaker
will be expressed by the speech act”, i.e. whether the speech act is
performed sincerely or not.
● Essential condition rules “say what kind of illocutionary act the utterance is
to count as”.

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Searle’s basic categories of illocutionary acts
● Representatives: They have a truth value. The speaker believes a proposition
○ ‘Asserting’ ‘reporting’ ‘stating’ ‘concluding’
● Directives: An attempt by a speaker to get the hearer to do something
○ ‘Requesting’ ‘ordering’ ‘commanding’ ‘begging’
● Commissives: The speaker commits to some future course of action
○ ‘Promising’ ‘threatening’ ‘offering’
● Expressives: The point is to express the psychological state about something
in the propositional content
○ ‘Thanking’ ‘congratulating’ ‘apologizing’
● Declarations: When such acts are performed, there is a change of state in the
world.
○ ‘Christening’ ‘firing’ ‘declaring war’

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Direct and Indirect Speech Acts
● Direct speech acts: There is a direct match between the sentence type and its
illocutionary force.
○ Pass the salt, please
● Indirect speech act: There is an ulterior illocutionary point underneath the
actual meaning of the sentence.
○ Can you pass the salt?
● Is actually a request disguised as a question.
● There is a difference between what is said and what is meant by the speaker.
● The speaker counts on the hearer to decode the disguised message.
■ What about sarcasm?

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PAUL GRICE’S THEORY OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE

There is often a great deal of difference between what is said and what is actually
meant – one could also say what is implicated – by the speaker. The hearer has
to make certain inferences to recognize and understand this actual meaning
which is implicated by the speaker in what he or she said.

Grice understands conversational implicatures ‘as being essentially connected

with certain general features of discourse’. These features include certain
expectations, mutually shared by the participants.

These ‘guidelines’ enable both speaker and hearer to make inferences about
each other’s communicative behaviour

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Cooperative Principle
Grice formulates these ‘basic assumptions about the rational nature of
conversational activity’ in his Cooperative Principle:

‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the state at

which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in
which you are engaged’

This principle is constituted by the maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner

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Gricean Maxims
The category of QUANTITY relates to the quantity of information to be provided,
and under it fall the following maxims:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Under the category of QUALITY falls a supermaxim – ‘Try to make your
contribution one that is true’ – and two more specific maxims:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
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Under the category RELATION I place a single maxim, namely, ‘Be relevant’.

Finally, under the category of MANNER, which I understand as relating not (like
the previous categories) to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said is to
be said, I include the supermaxim ‘Be perspicuous’ and various maxims such as:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be orderly.

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Conclusions
● Speech acts are manifestations of language as action that – driven by
intentions of speakers – cause effects and thus have psychological and
behavioural consequences in speaker–hearer interactions.
● There is a difference between the way in which an utterance is used and the
meaning that is expressed by this utterance in certain contexts.
● Speakers may say one thing that has a specific meaning but that also means
something else in certain circumstances because of certain social
conventions that are valid within a specific speech community.
● The central point of this exercise is to think about how we perceive our world,
and what are the different ways in which we make sense of what we
experience.
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Fin.

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