what is speech act

• Professional Development UPCOMING PROGRAMS Summer Institutes for Teachers Upcoming Conferences Presentations & Workshops PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES Advanced Practices Certificate CARLA Fellow Program RESOURCES & ARCHIVES Conference Organizing & Publishing Resources Presentation Recordings Conference Archives
• Publications CARLA Publications & Working Papers CARLA Bibliography Literacies in Language Education
• About CARLA CENTER INFORMATION Mission A Language Resource Center Funding History CARLA Update CONTACT INFORMATION Contact Us Mailing List Subscription CARLA Staff & Faculty OTHER INFORMATION Employment Opportunities Request Copyright Permission Document Use of CARLA Material
• Background Information
• American English
• Teaching Tips
• Teaching Materials
• Research Notes
• Australian English
• Functions and Classification
• British English
• Argentinean Spanish
• Canadian French
• Strategy Descriptions
• Marathi & Hindi
• Research Project
• Japanese Speech Acts
• Pragmatics & Speech Acts Bibliography
• Spanish Pragmatics
• CARLA Summer Institutes
• CARLA Bibliography

What is a Speech Act?

A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day:

Greeting:   "Hi, Eric. How are things going?" Request:   "Could you pass me the mashed potatoes, please?" Complaint:   "I’ve already been waiting three weeks for the computer, and I was told it would be delivered within a week." Invitation:   "We’re having some people over Saturday evening and wanted to know if you’d like to join us." Compliment:   "Hey, I really like your tie!" Refusal:   "Oh, I’d love to see that movie with you but this Friday just isn’t going to work."

Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Because the natural tendency for language learners is to fall back on what they know to be appropriate in their first language, it is important that these learners understand exactly what they do in that first language in order to be able to recognize what is transferable to other languages. Something that works in English might not transfer in meaning when translated into the second language. For example, the following remark as uttered by a native English speaker could easily be misinterpreted by a native Chinese hearer:

Sarah: "I couldn’t agree with you more. " Cheng: "Hmmm…." (Thinking: "She couldn’t agree with me? I thought she liked my idea!")

An example of potential misunderstanding for an American learner of Japanese would be what is said by a dinner guest in Japan to thank the host. For the invitation and the meal the guests may well apologize a number of times in addition to using an expression of gratitude (arigatou gosaimasu) -- for instance, for the intrusion into the private home (sumimasen ojama shimasu), the commotion that they are causing by getting up from the table (shitsurei shimasu), and also for the fact that they put their host out since they had to cook the meal, serve it, and will have to do the dishes once the guests have left (sumimasen). American guests might think this to be rude or inappropriate and choose to compliment the host on the wonderful food and festive atmosphere, or thank the host for inviting them, unaware of the social conventions involved in performing such a speech act in Japanese. Although such compliments or expression of thanks are also appropriate in Japanese, they are hardly enough for native speakers of Japanese -- not without a few apologies!

Back to Speech Acts .

• Twin Cities Campus:
• Parking & Transportation
• Maps & Directions
•       Directories
• Contact U of M
•       Privacy

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

speech act theory

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• University of Minnesota - Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition - Pragmatics and Speech Acts
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Speech Acts

speech act theory , Theory of meaning that holds that the meaning of linguistic expressions can be explained in terms of the rules governing their use in performing various speech acts (e.g., admonishing , asserting, commanding, exclaiming, promising, questioning, requesting, warning). In contrast to theories that maintain that linguistic expressions have meaning in virtue of their contribution to the truth conditions of sentences where they occur, it explains linguistic meaning in terms of the use of words and sentences in the performance of speech acts. Some exponents claim that the meaning of a word is nothing but its contribution to the nature of the speech acts that can be performed by using it. Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin provided important stimuli for the theory’s development.

• Media Studies
• Communication
• Linguistics

Speech Act Theory | How Words Shape Meaning & Interactions

• June 27, 2023 March 31, 2024

In the captivating world of media and communications, one theory that holds immense importance is the Speech Act Theory. Developed by philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle, this theory helps us comprehend how our words possess the power to shape meaning. Also, how it influences our interactions with others. Let’s delve into this theory and explore its key concepts to unlock the secrets of effective communication.

The Power of Words

Words are not merely sounds or symbols; they carry profound power. Thus, they possess the ability to convey thoughts, express emotions, and influence others. Speech Act Theory enables us to comprehend that when we speak, we are not solely stating facts, but also performing actions through our words.

Understanding the power of words allows us to recognise the impact our speech has on others. It helps us become conscious of the choices we make in our language use. Thus, making us aware of the potential consequences they may have. By harnessing the power of words, we can express ourselves effectively and create meaningful connections with those around us.

Locution, Illocution & Perlocution

Speech acts can be understood through three levels: locution, illocution, and perlocution. Locution refers to the actual words and phrases we use. Illocution focuses on the intentions behind our words, such as making a request or giving an order. Perlocution refers to the impact our words have on others, like persuading or motivating them to take action.

By recognising these levels of speech acts, we gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of communication. We become aware that our words carry not only literal meanings but also implied intentions. We then need to consider the potential effects on the receiver. This awareness enables us to be more mindful of our speech and adapt it according to our communicative goals.

Types of Speech Acts

Speech Act Theory categorises speech acts into three main types: assertive, directive, and expressive. Assertive speech acts aim to convey information, such as stating facts or making claims. Directive speech acts involve issuing commands or requests. Expressive speech acts express emotions, attitudes, or feelings.

Understanding the different types of speech acts helps us navigate various communicative situations effectively. We learn to recognise when we need to provide information, give instructions, or express ourselves emotionally. This knowledge allows us to choose the appropriate speech acts to achieve our communication goals. Therefore, allowing us to convey our intended meanings accurately.

Felicity Conditions

For a speech act to be successful, certain conditions known as felicity conditions must be met. These conditions ensure that the act is performed appropriately and is understood by the intended audience. Felicity conditions may include factors such as sincerity, relevance, and the social context in which the speech act takes place. Understanding and adhering to these conditions contribute to effective communication.

Recognising felicity conditions helps us gauge the appropriateness and effectiveness of our speech acts. Therefore, we become more conscious of the importance of sincerity in our words. Furthermore, the relevance of our statements to the context, and finally the impact of social norms on communication. By considering these conditions, we enhance our ability to convey our messages successfully and build stronger connections with others.

Speech Act Theory & Performativity

Speech Act Theory emphasises the concept of performativity. This suggests that by uttering specific words, we bring about a change in the world. For example, saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife” during a wedding ceremony establishes a new marital status for the couple. Our words have the power to create realities and shape social structures. This aspect of speech acts highlights their transformative nature.

Understanding performativity allows us to appreciate the significant influence of our words on social and cultural contexts. As a result, we become aware of the role our speech plays in shaping perceptions, reinforcing norms, and constructing shared meanings. Also, by harnessing the power of performativity, we can contribute to positive social change and inspire others through our words.

Contextual Factors of Speech Act Theory

Context plays a vital role in comprehending speech acts. The same words can have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. For instance, cultural norms, social relationships, and shared knowledge influence the interpretation of speech acts. Being aware of these contextual factors is essential for effective communication. Therefore, understanding the situational context helps to avoid miscommunication and ensures that the intended meaning is conveyed.

Considering contextual factors enhances our ability to adapt our communication to specific situations. We become sensitive to cultural nuances and adapt our language to different social relationships. Also, it allows us to utilise shared knowledge to convey our ideas effectively. By understanding context, we navigate diverse communication settings with ease and promote mutual understanding.

Pragmatics & Politeness

Speech Act Theory is closely intertwined with Pragmatics , the study of how language is used in real-life situations. Politeness is a significant aspect of pragmatics. Sociolinguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson argue that Politeness Strategies , such as using indirect language or employing polite expressions, help maintain social harmony and prevent potential conflicts. Being aware of cultural and social norms of politeness aids in building positive interpersonal relationships.

Understanding pragmatics and politeness allows us to engage in effective and harmonious communication. Thus, we learn to adapt our speech to different social contexts, respect cultural norms, and demonstrate consideration for others. Therefore, by employing politeness strategies, we cultivate empathy, show respect, and foster healthy relationships with those around us.

Criticisms of Speech Act Theory

Despite its significant contributions to understanding communication, Speech Act Theory is not without its criticisms. Some scholars argue that the theory places excessive focus on the speaker’s intentions. Therefore, it neglects the role of the listener in interpreting speech acts. They suggest that meaning is a collaborative effort between the speaker and the listener. This is influenced by shared knowledge and social context.

Others criticise Speech Act Theory for its limited scope in accounting for non-verbal communication. Also, the impact of non-linguistic elements such as body language and facial expressions. They argue that meaning is not solely derived from words but also from non-verbal cues that accompany speech acts.

Additionally, critics point out that Speech Act Theory tends to overlook the role of power dynamics and social inequalities in communication. They argue that the ability to perform certain speech acts may be constrained by societal structures. Thus, not all individuals have equal opportunities to exercise their speech acts freely.

Speech Act Theory offers us a valuable framework for comprehending the power of words and the intricacies of human communication. By recognising the various levels of speech acts, the significance of felicity conditions, the transformative nature of performativity, the impact of context, and the importance of pragmatics and politeness, we can become more effective communicators. However, it is important to acknowledge the criticisms of the theory and consider alternative perspectives. This helps us to then develop a more comprehensive understanding of communication.

Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words . Oxford University Press.

Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language . Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage . Cambridge University Press.

• Skip to Content
• Skip to Main Navigation
• Skip to Search

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington IU Bloomington

• My Research
• Books/Edited Volumes
• Reviews of My Books
• 500 Years Later
• UNAM/IU, May 17-18
• My Teaching
• Service Encounters
• Implicature
• Invitations
• Disinvitations
• Compliments
• Politeness 1
• Politeness 2
• Impoliteness
• North America
• Central America
• South America
• Voces Hispanas
• Refusals (Eng)
• Refusals (Span)
• Compliments (Span)
• Capítulo 10
• Recursos para instructores
• Respuestas de los ejercicios del libro
• Actos de habla
• Encuentros de servicio

Pragmatics & Discourse at IU

Speech acts.

Although the idea that language is used to express social action was initially conceptualized in Plato’s Cratylus (1875), our current understanding of language, speech act theory and communicative action, dates back to modern philosophical thinking (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Wittgenstein, 1953/1957). These philosophers stated that the function of language is to perform speech acts or actions (or Wittgenstein’s concept of “language-games”), such as describing or reporting the weather, requesting a letter of recommendation from a professor, apologizing for arriving late, or complaining to our boss about an unfair work load. This view of language rejected the ideas of logical positivism of the 1930s that believed that the main function of language was to describe true or false statements. However, it was in the mid-1950’s that philosophical thinking brought speech act theory to life with the seminal work on speech acts by J. L. Austin and John Searle, two language philosophers who were concerned with meaning, use, and action. Speech acts represent a key concept in the field of pragmatics which can be broadly defined as language use in context taking into account the speaker’s and the addressee’s verbal and non-verbal contributions to the negotiation of meaning in interaction.

Although speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) was not designed to examine stretches of talk in social interaction, it provided the foundation for the analysis of social action. Austin proposed a three-way taxonomy of speech acts: (i) a locutionary act refers to the act of saying something meaningful, that is, the act of uttering a fragment or a sentence in the literal sense (referring and predicating); (ii) an illocutionary act is performed by saying something that has a conventional force such as informing, ordering, warning, complaining, requesting, or refusing; and (iii) a perlocutionary act refers to what we achieve ‘ by  saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading’ (1962: 109 [emphasis in original]).

Austin’s main interest was in utterances used to perform actions with words (e.g. ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’). For these actions to be accomplished, they must be executed under the appropriate conditions: (i) a conventional procedure and effect; (ii) the appropriate circumstances; (iii) the correct and complete execution of the procedure by all persons; and (iv) certain thoughts and feelings about the realization of the act on the part of persons involved [Austin: 1962: 14-15]). The notion of ‘performative action’ is fundamental to the analysis of formal and non-formal institutional interactions because it considers both speaker and hearer co-constructing joint actions in specific sociocultural contexts.

Searle’s (1976) classification of speech acts classified according to the illocutionary point, psychological state, and the direction of fit (word to world or world to word)

Pragmatics & Discourse at IU resources

• César Félix-Brasdefer, Ph.D. - [email protected]

Speech Act Theory

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 29 December 2020
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi 4  

124 Accesses

Posited by J.L. Austin, the Speech Act Theory considers language use as a type of action, and not merely as a medium to convey information and express thoughts. For example, the sentence “For security reasons, the girls are not allowed to come out from their hostels after 08.00 PM.” is considered as a speech act as it has two elements in it: to provide protection to girls as well as forcing them to remain inside their hostels. So, the speech act for security reasons is performative.

Introduction

Unlike the objectivist approaches which define security in terms of a threat and recommend that it can be controlled by the military force acted by state actors (Walt 1991 , p. 212), the Copenhagen School challenges this stance and defines security as a speech act. The School conceptualizes security within the analytical framework of “securitization,” and not as an objective condition. Weaver, an advocate of this framework, argues that security is a speech act (Buzan et al. 1998 , p....

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Further Reading

Buzan, B., Waever, O., & de Wilde, J. (1998). Security a new framework for analysis . Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

Google Scholar  

Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019: What is it and why is it seen as a problem. (2019, December 31). The Economic Times . https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/et-explains/citizenship-amendment-bill-what-does-it-do-and-why-is-it-seen-as-a-problem/articleshow/72436995.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Does security exist outside of the speech act? (2011, October 9). E-International Relations . https://www.e-ir.info/2011/10/09/does-security-exist-outside-of-the-speech-act/

Waever, O. (1995). Securitisation and desuritisation. In R. D. Lipschutz (Ed.), On security (pp. 46–87). New York: Columbia University Press.

Walt, S. M. (1991). The renaissance of security studies. International Studies Quarterly, 35 , 211–239.

Article   Google Scholar  

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Languages and Literature, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Katra, India

Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

University of Alberta, Alberta, AB, Canada

Scott Romaniuk

University for Peace, San Jose, Costa Rica

Manish Thapa

Nemzetkozi Tanulmanyok Intezet, Rm 503, Corvinus Univ, Inst of Intl Studies, Budapest, Hungary

Péter Marton

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Dwivedi, A.V. (2021). Speech Act Theory. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_132-1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_132-1

Received : 29 February 2020

Accepted : 19 July 2020

Published : 29 December 2020

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-74336-3

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-74336-3

eBook Packages : Springer Reference Political Science and International Studies Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Applied Linguistics
• Biology of Language
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics
• Historical Linguistics
• History of Linguistics
• Language Families/Areas/Contact
• Linguistic Theories
• Neurolinguistics
• Phonetics/Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sign Languages
• Sociolinguistics
• Share Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Speech acts.

• Mitchell Green Mitchell Green Philosophy, University of Connecticut
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.200
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.

Recent theorizing about speech acts tends to fall either into conventionalist or intentionalist traditions: the former sees speech acts as analogous to moves in a game, with such acts being governed by rules of the form “doing A counts as doing B”; the latter eschews game-like rules and instead sees speech acts as governed by communicative intentions only. Debate also arises over the extent to which speakers can perform one speech act indirectly by performing another. Skeptics about the frequency of such events contend that many alleged indirect speech acts should be seen instead as expressions of attitudes. New developments in speech act theory also situate them in larger conversational frameworks, such as inquiries, debates, or deliberations made in the course of planning. In addition, recent scholarship has identified a type of oppression against under-represented groups as occurring through “silencing”: a speaker attempts to use a speech act to protect her autonomy, but the putative act fails due to her unjust milieu.

• performative
• illocutionary force
• communicative intentions
• perlocution
• felicity condition
• speaker meaning
• presupposition
• indirect speech act
• illocutionary silencing

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Linguistics. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 15 September 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• [185.66.14.236]
• 185.66.14.236

Character limit 500 /500

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › Speech Act Theory

Speech Act Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 11, 2020 • ( 0 )

Speech act theory accounts for an act that a speaker performs when pronouncing an utterance, which thus serves a function in communication. Since speech acts are the tools that allow us to interact in real-life situations, uttering a speech act requires knowledge not only of the language but also of its appropriate use within a given culture.

Speech act theory was first developed by J. L. Austin whose seminal Oxford Lectures in 1952–4 marked an important development in the philosophy of language and linguistics. Austin’s proposal can be viewed as a reaction to the extreme claims of logical positivists, who argued that the meaning of a sentence is reducible to its verifiability, that is to an analysis which verifies if utterances are true or false. Austin contended that most of our utterances do more than simply making statements: questions and orders are not used to state something, and many declarative sentences do not lend themselves to being analysed in terms of their falsifiability. Instead, they are instruments that allow speakers to change the state of affairs. This is tantamount to saying that we use language mainly as a tool to do things, and we do so by means of performing hundreds of ordinary verbal actions of different types in daily life, such as make telephone calls, baptise children, or fire an employee.

The fact that not all sentences are a matter of truth verifiability was first advanced by Aristotle who, in his De Interpretatione , argued that:

there are in the mind thoughts which do not involve truth or falsity, and also those which must be either true or false, so it is in speech. [. . .] A sentence is a significant portion of speech [. . .] Yet every sentence is not a proposition; only such are propositions as have in them either truth or falsity. [. . .] Let us therefore dismiss all other types of sentence but the proposition, for this last concerns our present inquiry, whereas the investigation of the others belongs rather to the study of rhetoric or of poetry. (1–4)

Although he explicitly deems the nature of sentences to be uninteresting in his inquiry on apophantic logos, Aristotle represents the first account of language as action.

J. L. Austin/The Times Literary Supplement

Aristotle’s standpoint influenced the study of language for centuries and paved the way for a tradition of research on verifiability, but several German and British philosophers anticipated a view of language as a tool to change a state of affairs. The issues of language and conversation were addressed by Immanuel Kant who anticipated some concepts like ‘context’ and ‘subjective idealisation’, the rules that articulate conversation, and the para-linguistic gestures used in the accomplishment of speech acts. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that a more elaborate treatment of language as action was initiated.

The first, although non-systematic, study of the action-like character of language was conducted by Thomas Reid, who described different acts that can be performed through language, and grouped them into two categories: ‘solitary acts’ like judgements, intentions, deliberations and desiring, which can go unexpressed; and ‘social operations’ like commanding, promising or warning, which, by their very social nature, must be expressed. Reid’s contribution to the inception of a speech act theory can be fully understood if viewed from the wider perspective of the philosophical developments of his time.

Franz Brentano’s distinction between physical and psychological phenomena is particularly relevant in this respect because it reintroduced to philosophy the scholastic concept of‘intentionality’, which allows for a distinction between mental acts and the external world. As far as speech act theory is concerned, suffice it here to say that Brentano argued that every mental, psychological act has a content and is directed at an object (the intentional object), which means that mental phenomena contain an object intentionally within themselves and are thus definable as objectifying acts. The Brentanian approach to intentionality* allows for a distinction between linguistic expressions describing psychological phenomena and linguistic expressions describing non-psychological phenomena. Furthermore, Brentano claimed that speaking is itself an activity through which we can initiate psychic phenomena. Edmund Husserl picked up the importance of what Brentano’s psychological investigation could bring to logic*, in particular the contrast between emotional acts and objectifying acts. Husserl tackled the issue of human mental activities (‘acts’) and how they constitute the ‘object’ of knowledge through experience. In his Logical Investigations (1900/1) he developed a theory of meaning based on ‘intentionality’ which, for him, meant that consciousness entails ‘directedness’ towards an object. It is on the notion of ‘objectifying acts’, that is acts of representation, that Husserl shaped his theory of linguistic meaning, thus emphasising the referential use of language. Collaterally he treated the non-representational uses of language, that is acts like asking questions, commanding or requesting.

Following Brentano and moving within the field of psychology, Anton Marty offered the first account of uses of language meant to direct others’ behaviour, like giving an order, requesting, or giving encouragement. Marty stated that sentences may hint at the speaker’s psychic processes and argued that ‘deliberate speaking is a special kind of acting, whose proper goal is to call forth certain psychic phenomena in other beings’ (1908: 284). Stemming from Brentano’s tripartite subdivision of mental phenomena into presentation, judgements, and phenomena of love and hate, Marty discriminated linguistic forms into names, statements and emotives (utterances arousing an interest), which is a model that closely resembles Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie. It is precisely to Bühler that we owe the coinage of the label ‘speech act theory’. He offered the first thorough study of the functions of language – Darstellung (representation), Kindgabe (intimation or expression), and Auslösung (arousal or appeal) – thus endowing non-representational sentences with their own status.

A more complete treatment we find in the work of Adolf Reinach, who offered the first systematic theory of speech acts. Reinach received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich; his dissertation was on the concept of cause in penal law. It was within the context of legal language that Reinach argued in favour of the relevance of speech acts which he referred to, presumably independently of Reid’s work, as ‘social acts, that is acts of the mind that are performed in the very act of speaking’. Reinach (1913) provided a detailed taxonomy of social acts as performative* utterances and their modification, and stated very clearly that the utterance ( Äusserung ) of a social act is different from the inner experience of emotions like anger or shame and from statements ( Konstatierungen ) about experiences. It is precisely the recourse to the physical medium, the Äusserung , that transforms the philosophical category of action into a social act. Drawing on previous literature, Reinach separated actions from internal experiences. Then he discriminated between external actions like kissing or killing and linguistic actions, and within this class he distinguished between social acts, which are performed in every act of speaking, and actions, where signs are used but no speech act is performed such as in ‘solitary asserting’ and emotive uses of language. The final distinction refers to the linguistic actions performed in uttering performative formulae and the linguistic and nonlinguistic actions whose performance has an effect on the state of affairs and even changes it.

While Reinach’s ideas were spreading through the Munich scholars, at Oxford A. J. Ayer, considered the philosophical successor of Bertrand Russell, deemed philosophically interesting only those sentences that can be subject to the truth-condition analysis. In line with the logical positivism* of the Vienna Circle, Ayer developed the verification principle in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) where he stated that a sentence is meaningful only if it has verifiable import. Sentences expressing judgements, evaluation and the like were not to be objects of scientific inquiry. This stance, which is now known as the ‘descriptive fallacy’, led him into conflict with Oxford linguist philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, who instead were greatly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He claimed that a language consists of a wide multiplicity of structures and usages that logical positivists had neglected to analyse but which encompass the majority of what human beings say in their construction of meaning.

Following Wittgenstein’s insights into language and putting himself against the positivist background, Gilbert Ryle rejected the Cartesian mind-body dualism in The Concept of Mind ( 1949), and revived the centrality of the standard uses of language, thus contributing to the development of ‘ordinary language philosophy’* in Oxford.

Taking the same veil and influenced by Husserl, Austin rejected the account that only sentences that are meant to describe a state of affairs are worth studying, and he observed that verifiable sentences are only a small part of the large amount of utterances produced by language users. Not all utterances express propositions: many perform actions as, for example, greetings or orders, which resist a truth-conditional analysis. Indeed, most of the sentences uttered by speakers are used in such a way as to perform more fundamental things in verbal interactions, such as naming a ship, marrying a couple, or making a request. In daily life we perform many ordinary verbal actions, and utterances are used in speech events to accomplish all that is achieved through language. Austin’s speech act theory was first delineated in the notes he prepared for some lectures interestingly entitled Words and Deeds which he delivered at Oxford University from 1952 to 1954. Such notes constituted the basis on which he developed his Harvard lectures in 1955, posthumously published in 1962. In the first phase of development of his theory, Austin retained the Aristotelian distinction between apophantic and non-apophantic logos, and introduced the terms of constative utterances and performative utterances, where the former describe or constate a state of affairs and the latter perform actions. Austin later realised that a clear distinction between the two types of utterances is unsustainable. If, for example, we say ‘There is a rat under your chair’, we do more than assert a state of affairs: we warn someone about a possible danger. Assertions can thus be used to perform such acts as to warn, to apologise, and many more. Austin then abandoned the dichotomy and contended that to say something equals to perform something.

According to Austin, when we say something, we perform three acts simultaneously: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act. At the locutionary level, a speaker produces sounds (phonetic act) which are well ordered with respect to the phonological system and grammar of a particular language (phatic act), and carry some sense with respect to the semantic and pragmatic rules of that language (rhetic act). At the illocutionary level, he is expressing his intention by virtue of conventions shared in his speech community. At the perlocutionary level, he performs a third act which includes the consequences of his speaking, and he has only limited control over them. In order for the speechact to be successful, it must fulfil some appropriateness conditions, or ‘felicity’ conditions: locution is successful if words and sounds are correctly produced; illocution is appropriate if it meets the conditions for its realisation; perlocution may be effective when it produces consequences desired by the producer. The notion of illocutionary force embodies the philosophical notion of intentionality, which can be expressed by performing a speech act through three modalities: (1) directly or indirectly through the performance of another speech act (‘Pass me the salt’ versus ‘Can you pass me the salt?’); literally or non-literally depending on the way words are used (‘Stick it in your head’); (3) explicitly or inexplicitly when meaning is spelled out fully or incompletely (‘I’ll be back later, Mary’s ready’). Indirectness and nonliterality are disambiguated by way of a conversational implicature*, whereas explicitation is achieved through expansion or completion of what one says.

John Searle, one of Austin’s students, contributed widely to developing speech act theory, which he addressed from the viewpoint of intentionality. Specifically he conceived of linguistic intentionality as derived from mental intentionality. In his Speech Acts (1969) Searle claimed that Austin’s ‘felicity conditions’ are constitutive rules of speech acts to the extent that to perform a speech act means to meet the conventional rules which constitute a specific speech act. Moving from this approach and analysing the act of promising, Searle proposed a classification of speech acts into four categories: (1) propositional content (what the speech act isabout); (2) preparatory condition, which states the prerequisites for the speech act; (3) sincerity condition (the speaker has to sincerely intend to keep a promise); and (4) essential condition (the speaker’s intention that the utterance counts as an act and as such is to be recognised by the hearer). One of Searle’s major contributions to the theory refers to indirectness, that is the mismatch between an utterance and an illocutionary force.

The interpretation of indirect speech acts has drawn a great deal of attention. Drawing on H. P. Grice’s pragmatics, most scholars assume that some inferential work on the part of the hearer is required in order to identify the speaker’s communicative intention and the core question is how such inference can be computed. Searle (1975) assumes that the hearer recognises both a direct-literal force, which he understands as the secondary force, and an indirect-nonliteral force, which is the primary force. Similarly Dan Gordon and George Lakoff (1975) argue that inference rules that they label ‘conversational postulates’ reduce the amount of inferential computing necessary to disambiguate an indirect speech act. Jerrold Sadock (1974) departs from the inferential hypothesis and proposes ‘the idiom model’ by claiming that a speech act like ‘Can you pass me the salt?’ is promptly interpreted as a request and needs no inference.

Speech act theory received great attention and valid theoretical proposals from cognitive linguists. Klaus Panther and Linda Thornburg (1998) claim that our knowledge of illocutionary meaning may be systematically organised in the form of what they call ‘illocutionary scenarios’. They are formed by a before, a core, and an after component. If a person wants someone to bring him his pen, he can utter a direct speech act like ‘Bring me my pen’, which exploits the core component, or he can make his request indirectly exploiting either the before component (‘Can you bring me my pen?’) where the modal verb ‘can’ points to the hearer’s ability to perform the action, or the after component (‘You will bring me my pen, won’t you?’) where the auxiliary ‘will’ instantiates the after component of the request scenario. Panther (2005) makes the point that metonymies provide natural ‘inference schemas’ which are constantly used by speakers in meaning construction and interpretation. Scenarios may be accessed metonymically by invoking relevant parts of them. Indirect requests like ‘Can you open the door?’, ‘Will you close the window?’, ‘Do you have hot chocolate?’ exploit all pre-conditions for the performance of a request, that is, the ability and willingness of the hearer, and his possession of the required object. Such pre-conditions are used to stand for the whole speech act category. By means of the explicit mention of one of the components of the scenario, it is possible for the speaker to afford access to the hearer to the whole illocutionary category of ‘requesting’ in such a way that the utterance is effortlessly interpreted as a request. With a view to improving Panther’s proposal, Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (2007) contends that illocutionary meaning is directly tied to the notion of Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs), which are principle-governed cognitive structures. Illocutionary scenarios represent the way in which language users construct interactional meaning representations abstracted away from a number of stereotypical illocutionary situations. In an indirect request like ‘I fancy going out for dinner’ the hearer understands the implicated meaning by relying on high-level situational ICMs – that is, on the generic knowledge that expressing a wish indirectly corresponds to asking for its fulfillment. Thus, it is exactly the quick and easy retrieval from our long-term memory of a stored illocutionary scenario that allows us to identify the nature of indirectness.

Speech act theory is a thought-provoking issue which has attracted the interest of philosophers of language and linguists from diverse theoretical persuasions. Manifold aspects of the theory are being debated such as the classification of speech acts, the relationship between speech acts and culture, and the acquisition of speech acts by children, which proves how this area of language research still provides room for developments and new insights.

Primary sources Aristotle (1941). De Interpretatione. New York: Random House. 38–61. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon D. and G. Lakoff (1975). ‘Conversational postulates’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 83–106. Husserl, E. (1900/1). Logische Untersuchungen. Halle: Nyemeier.Panther, K. U. and L. Thornburg (1998). ‘A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation’. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Panther K. U. (2005). ‘The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction’. In F. Ruiz de Mendoza and S.Peña (eds), Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 353–86. Reinach, A. (1913). ‘Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes’. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1: 685–847. Ruiz de Mendoza, F. (2007). ‘High level cognitive models: in search of a unified framework for inferential and grammatical behavior’. In Krzysztof Kosecki (ed.), Perspectives on Metonymy. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 1130. Ryle G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson. Sadock J. (1974). Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. Searle J. R. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle J. R. (1975). ‘Indirect speech acts’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 59–82. Wittgenstein L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Further reading Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz. Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Leipzig: Duncke and Humbolt. Marty, A. (1908). Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Halle: Nyemeier. Reid, T. (1894). The Works of Thomas Reid. Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart.

Source: Key Ideas in Linguistics and the. Philosophy of Language. Edited by Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge. Edinburgh University Press. 2009.

Share this:

Categories: Literary Terms and Techniques

Tags: Adolf Reinach , Austin's Theory of Speech Act , Äusserung , illocutionary act , J. L. Austin Speech Act Theory , J.L. Austin , John Searle , Konstatierungen , Linguistics , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , locutionary act , Perlocutionary act , Speech act theory , Speech act theory Analysis , Speech act theory Essay , Speech act theory linguistics , Speech act theory notes , What is Speech act theory , Who developed Speech act theory

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Institutional Login

Access to the full content is only available to members of institutions that have purchased access. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order .

Loading content

We were unable to load the content

Article Summary

• content locked 1 Levels of speech acts
• content locked 2 Communicative and conventional speech acts
• content locked 3 Types of speech acts
• content locked 4 Direct, indirect and nonliteral speech acts
• content locked 5 Philosophical importance of speech act theory
• content locked Bibliography

Speech acts

Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language, but there are all sorts of other things we can do with words. We can make requests, ask questions, give orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies and so on. Moreover, almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker’s intention; there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one’s audience.

The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory. It must systematically classify types of speech acts and the ways in which they can succeed or fail. It must reckon with the fact that the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence ‘This is a pig sty’ might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy, and further to demand indirectly that it be tidied up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a farmyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning – in particular, the meaning of the word ‘this’ does not determine which area is being referred to. A major task for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in what they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning underdetermines use.

In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker’s intention, the attitude being expressed.

Some speech acts, however, are not primarily acts of communication and have the function not of communicating but of affecting institutional states of affairs. They can do so in either of two ways. Some officially judge something to be the case, and others actually make something the case. Those of the first kind include judges’ rulings, referees’ decisions and assessors’ appraisals, and the latter include sentencing, bequeathing and appointing. Acts of both kinds can be performed only in certain ways under certain circumstances by those in certain institutional or social positions.

Related Articles

• Assertion By Yang, Guiming; Goldberg, Sanford C.
• Grice, Herbert Paul (1913–88) By Baker, Judith
• Language, philosophy of By Crimmins, Mark
• Pragmatics By Recanati, Francois
• Semantics By Crimmins, Mark

• List of Theories
• Privacy Policy
• Opt-out preferences

SPEECH ACT THEORY

INTRODUCTION

The speech act theory considers language as a sort of action rather than a medium to convey and express. The contemporary Speech act theory developed by J. L. Austin a British philosopher of languages, he introduced this theory in 1975 in his well-known book of ‘How do things with words’.  Later John Searle brought the aspects of theory into much higher dimensions. This theory is often used in the field of philosophy of languages. Austin is the one who came up with the findings that people not only uses that language to assert things but also to do things. And people who followed him went to greater depths based on this point.

All sort of linguist communication are comprised of linguistic actions. Previously it was conceived that the very basic unit of communication is words, Symbols, sentences or some kind of token of all of these, but it was speech act theory which suggested that production or issuances if words, symbols are the basic units of communication. This issuance happens during the process of performance of speech act. The meaning of these basic units was considered as the building blocks of mutual understanding between the people intend to communicate.

“ A theory of language is a theory of action”- Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown.

The theory emphasis that the utterances have a different or specific meaning to its user and listener other than its meaning according to the language. The theory further identify that there are two kinds of utterances, they are called constative and performative utterances.  In his book of ‘How do things with words’ Austin clearly talks about the disparities between the constative and performative utterances.

A constative utterances is something which describes or denotes the situation, in relation with the fact of true or false.

Example: The teacher asked Olivia whether she had stolen the candy. Olivia replies “mmmmmm”. Here the utterances of Olivia describes the event in pact of answering her teacher whether the situation was true or false.

The performative utterances is something which do not describes anything at all. The utterances in the sentences or in the part of sentences are normally considered as having a meaning of its own. The feelings, attitudes, emotions and thoughts of the person performing linguistic act are much of a principal unit here.

Example: Bane and Sarah have been dating for the past four years. One fine evening Bane took Sarah to the most expensive restaurant in town. And he ordered the most expensive wine available in the restaurant. Then he moved closer to her and asked her that “ will you marry me?”. Sarah burst with contentment and replied “I will”. Here the “I will” of Sarah express her feelings, attitudes and emotional towards the context. This utterances have its specific meaning only in relation to it specific context.

Further Austin divides his linguistic act into three different categories. They are,

• Locutionary act – This is the act of saying something. It has a meaning and it creates an understandable utterly to convey or express
• Illocutionary act –  It is performed as an act of saying something or as an act of opposed to saying something. The illocutionary utterance has a certain force of it. It well well-versed with certain tones, attitudes, feelings, or emotions. There will be an intention of the speaker or others in illocutionary utterance. It is often used as a tone of warning in day today life
• Perlocutionary act – It normally creates a sense of consequential effects on the audiences. The effects may be in the form of thoughts, imaginations, feelings or emotions. The effect upon the addressee is the main charactership of perlocutionary utterances

For example

The locutionary act describes a dangerous situation, the illocutionary act acts as a force of the warning and perlocutionary acts frighten the addressee.

Austin himself admits that these three components of utterances are not altogether separable.“We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued- the total speech act – if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterance, and how each can go wrong. Perhaps indeed there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances.” Austin.

Searle suggested that the basic unit of linguistic communication is speech act. It can be a word, a phrase, a sentence or a sound, it should fulfil the task of expressing the intention of the user.  Understanding the user’s intention can lead to complete understanding of the speech act.

The context of speech act is in the context of situation than explanation. The speech act borrows it ideas from structuralism. The indirect speech act of John Searle was developed based on Austin’s speech act.

Related Posts:

• MEDIUM THEORY
• Diffusion of Innovation Theory
• Computer Mediated Communication

It has written in fabulous manner!!

lookie here

It is a nice script

very triggering to think more about language as cognition, languange as emotion, and language as action

please give us more example of the three levels of speech acts

The simplest and easiest explanation there is. Brief but direct to the point. 🙂

Till now i cannot get it,dod Austen devide Speech acts into constative and performative OR locutionary,illocutionary ,perlocutionary???

It’s a wonderful piece and wish to get more

learned a lot. Thanks!

Article is insightful and straight forward. Thumbs up.

Learned great from it

I do agree with Mari that more specific example is needed for each classification. Without such example， we are still hanging with those philosophical words.

Very impressive!

Thank you, for your contribution.

İ needed to read this twice to understand. The theory isn’t easy to understand in my opinion.

I got a little confusion on locutionary , illocutionary & perlocutionar also in the perforamtive & constative I’ m asking for more examples that I can be well on it.. but the rest are perfect understandable..

Very impressive, direct to the point hence easy to understand,, thanks much…!!

Nicely explained in precise manner.

Nice material

Really helpful for my graduation research and quoted some of it, I’m very grateful.

Paul C. Hoffman dice

Really helpful for my research Nice material

Thank you for this explanation!

Good explanation

Well develop and simple

Leave a Comment

Next post: SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM THEORY

Previous post: Attribution Theory

• Advertising, Public relations, Marketing and Consumer Behavior
• Business Communication
• Communication / General
• Communication Barriers
• Communication in Practice
• Communication Models
• Cultural Communication
• Development Communication
• Group Communication
• Intercultural Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Mass Communication
• Organisational Communication
• Political Communication
• Psychology, Behavioral And Social Science
• Technical Communication
• Visual Communication

Communication Theory

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Back to Entry
• Entry Contents
• Entry Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Notes to Speech Acts

1. In his The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law (1913), the Austrian jurist Adolf Reinach developed what he termed a theory of “social acts” prefiguring many of the themes of later Anglo-American work on speech acts. For an appraisal see Mulligan 1987. See also K. Schuhmann and B. Smith 1991 for a discussion of some elements of speech act theory in the thought of Thomas Reid. Smith 1990 offers a more general historical survey.

2. See Gorman 1999, however, for a detailed account of how literary theory has appropriated a distorted view of speech acts.

3. In what follows I shall use ‘utterance’ to refer to any production by an agent of meaningful words. Uses of Nicaraguan Sign Language, Morse Code, and my repetition of words I overhear from another language but do not understand all count as utterances on this permissive criterion.

4. The term ‘performative’ has been appropriated in fields outside Philosophy. For instance, social scientists sometimes describe utterances as performative on the ground that they “enact the events they describe“ (Callon 2006). ‘Leading economic indicators are positive,’ when spoken by the U.S. Federal Reserve can help to ensure that such indicators are positive. Notwithstanding the interest of the phenomenon, this usage would also treat ‘This sentence is true’ as performative, and likewise for ‘I am whispering,’ when said in whisper. To avoid confusion we will not adopt this inclusive usage. See Callon (2006) and Miller (2007) for further discussions of performativity conforming to this usage.

5. In that same article, Searle notes Austin’s definition of ‘rhetic act’ as an utterance of words with a definite sense and reference. He then points out that Austin’s examples of indirect reports of rhetic acts generally contain illocutionary verbs, such as we find in ‘He told me to get out,’ and ‘He asked whether it was in Oxford or Cambridge.’ Searle concludes that all rhetic acts are therefore illocutionary acts. Unfortunately, this conclusion depends on an over-generalization from the cases Austin considers. Another perfectly adequate report of a rhetic act is simply, ‘She said that she would be more punctual in the future.’ In this case, we have no idea whether the speaker is being described as predicting or promising or just practicing lines from a play. Searle’s conclusion (1968, p. 413) that all rhetic acts are also illocutionary acts is thus unwarranted by his argument on its behalf.

6. The absurdity that these sentences exhibit is often disclosed under the rubric of Moore’s Paradox, for further discussion see Green and Williams 2007.

7. König and Seimund (2007) provide an extensive cross-linguistic study of the interaction of illocutionary force with grammatical mood.

8. See the essays collected in Warnock 1973 for speculation about Austin’s research plans that were tragically cut short by his early death.

9. The characterization is thus analogous to the way in which some non-classical logical theories describe some proposition as being neither True nor False, but as having a third truth value, N : Evidently that is not to say that such propositions are bereft of truth value. It is difficult to discern from such accounts how one sheds light on a speech act in characterizing it as having a null direction of fit, as opposed to having no direction of fit at all. See Humberstone 1992 for a fuller discussion of the notion of direction of fit.

10. In his groundbreaking discussion of implicature, Grice (1989) appears to treat conversational implicata as cases of speaker meaning. This might encourage the view that what is implicated must also be a speech act. It may well be that some implicata area also illocutions. However, many are not. If A asks B, “Where is C,” and B replies, “Downtown somewhere,” B may well be indicating that she is not in a position to be any more specific about C’s whereabouts. However, it is doubtful that she is asserting that she is in no such position. After all, if B did know precisely where in Downtown C is, she would be misleading in responding to A as she did, but she would not be a liar. By contrast, one who asserts something she does not believe to be true has lied. Accordingly, understanding indirect speech acts in terms of implicature does not guarantee that they will turn out to be illocutions after all.

11. Millikan writes, “Natural conventionality is composed of two, quite simple, related characteristics. First, natural conventions consist of patterns that are “reproduced” in a sense to be defined. Second, the fact that these patterns proliferate is due partly to the weight of precedent rather than due, for example, to their intrinsically superior capacity to perform certain functions. That is all.” (1998, p. 162)

12. I take it that the “certain condition” Searle refers to in the passage quoted can be specified without his claim becoming trivial.

13. This terminology is misleading because according to philosophers’ usage, an act can be one of speaker meaning with no sounds uttered or even any inscriptions made. For instance two hunters with no common language might communicate with pantomime, so that when one acts out the path of attack he means, in the sense of speaker meaning, that the other is to approach the mammoth from behind. In spite of the misleading nature of the jargon of speaker meaning I shall retain it rather than introduce new nomenclature.

14. It may be that adults who seem to address pre-linguistic infants are only making as if to speaker-mean things to them, and are instead addressing themselves. It would appear that only in some cases are those adults harboring reflexive-communicative intentions toward themselves. We observe here also that Armstrong 1971 offers an account of speaker meaning in terms of objectives rather than intentions, his reason being that the latter notion is narrower than the former. One who intends a certain result must believe that the thing aimed at is within her power, while one who has that result as an objective need not do so. Presently we shall show an affinity between Armstrong’s position and that offered below. However, just replacing ‘intention’ with ‘objective’ in Grice’s account will not deal with the cases we have considered. It is not part of my objective to produce an effect in my newborn daughter in uttering the last line of Spinoza’s Ethics . Similarly it need be no part of the objective of the framed suspect in maintaining her innocence to produce effects on her interrogators. Instead she may say what she does in order to make public, for anyone who may be concerned with the matter, her avowal of innocence. Her objective is simply to establish a pattern of consistently maintained innocence.

15. Following a suggestion of Schiffer (1972, p. 15), Strawson (1970, p. 7), and Bennett (1976, p. 271), Avramides 1989 proposes in response to these kinds of case that the speaker is addressing himself, intending in particular to produce a certain cognitive effect in himself. While it may be that in the newborn daughter case the speaker is addressing himself, it neither follows, nor does it seem true, that in those cases the speaker is intending to produce any cognitive effect in himself. We sometimes address ourselves in order to produce a cognitive effect: ‘I can do it!’ as I sprint up the steep road, or ‘945–6743, 945–6743’ as I try to internalize a phone number I just got out of the phone book. However, I already believe that all things valuable are difficult as they are rare. In fact it is a belief I have held firmly since encountering it in Spinoza two decades ago, and I actively believe it as I reflect upon the number of diapers I will have changed by the time I am forty. As a result it is quite unclear what cognitive effect I might be trying to produce in myself in saying what I do. His own eyes have already done that for him. Likewise it is far from clear what belief the framed suspect might be trying to produce or strengthen or activate in herself as she maintains her innocence. The suspect knows perfectly well that she has never set foot in the part of town in which the crime was committed, and that she has no idea how to use the garotte with which the victim was killed. (Avramides’ discussion here is confusing because she first responds to a case, due to Harman, of a person maintaining a proposition in full knowledge that no one will believe him, with the words, ’I think that in Harman’s case the speaker is not really speaking to an audience at all’ (p. 64). But then two pages later Avramides writes, ‘The misleading thing about Harman’s case is that there appears to be an audience present. The speaker, however, does not really address his utterance to those present …. If this is true, why not say that in such cases the speaker intends his audience to be himself …’ (p. 66). I shall take Avramides to hold the view that in these cases the speaker does have an audience, namely himself.)

16. Hajdin 1991 argues that attending to illocutionary force and semantic content is insufficient to account for the meaning of even paradigm speech acts such as promising. His reason is that one can know that a promise that agents A and B will not, say hold hands, has been made, without knowing who is responsible for ensuring that that promise is carried out. (It might be A, B or a third party.) However, even if it is true that specifying a “force/content pair” is insufficient to answer this question, it does not follow, and is not true, that such facts about responsibility are aspects either of what is meant or how it is meant.

17. See the essays collected in Parrett and J. Verschueren 1992.

18. Artificial Intelligence research has employed the tools of speech act theory to help automated systems determine the plans of human agents. Prominent examples are the chapters in Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1990, and Shoham 1993.

19. Adapted from Green 2000. An argument is illocutionarily sound just in case it is both illocutionarily valid and all its premises are such that their conditions of satisfaction are met. A fuller account of illocutionary validity would employ further distinctions. For example, two assertoric commitments may be alike save for differing in strength; these differences are usually described as differences in subjective probability, which could be represented as differences in the strength of commitment. Again, we could distinguish among the different possible objects of commitment, since there is nothing to rule out being committed to a question or to an imperative. These distinctions within the dimension of mode, strength and object of commitment are taken into account in Green 2000. See also Harrah (1980, 1994) for a discussion of assertoric, erotetic, and projective commitment. Observe also that the truth-preservation notion of validity may be seen as a special case of the commitment-preservation notion as follows: Treat each of the sentences in the argument counting as valid in the former sense as being put forth in assertoric mode, and treat each such sentence as declarative. Illocutionary validity is thus not a rival to the truth-preservation notion, but is instead a generalization thereof.

Copyright © 2020 by Mitchell Green < mitchell . green @ uconn . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

• Advanced Searches
• Legislation
• Congressional Record
• Search Tools
• Browse the Help Center

Examples: "Trade Relations", "Export Controls"

Examples: hr5, h.r.5, sjres8, sa2, pl116-21, 86Stat1326

Examples: trade sanctions reform, small modular reactor

Examples: hr5, h.r.5, sjres8, s2, 90stat2495

Examples: baseball, "standing rules"

Examples: 5, 20, 37

Examples: hr5021, H.Res.866, sconres15, S.51, 117pl2, 117-2

Examples: "enrolled bill signed", "leak detection dog"

Examples: "diplomatic service", retired

Examples: PN4, pn12, pn1633-2, 118PN345

Examples: Morris, Beck

Examples: general, "deputy under secretary"

Examples: judiciary, "Coast Guard"

Examples: marine mammals, "5 U.S.C. 801", "Presidential Address"

Example: peace corps

Examples: EC6228, r12313, PM45, PT83, ML160

Example: 5 U.S.C. 801

Examples: "trade relations", "Export Control Act"

Examples: EC2, PM32, POM43

Examples: UNESCO, "sea turtles"

Examples: 115-3, 114-13(A)

Example: 106-1

H.R.4471 - Speech Privacy Act of 2023 118th Congress (2023-2024) | $(document).ready(function () { $('#alert-BILL-442624-608').congress_Alert({ type: 'BILL', id: '442624', buttonDivId: 'alert-BILL-442624-608', buttonText: 'Get alerts', buttonTextIfLoggedIn: 'Get alerts', buttonTextIfHasAlert: 'Cancel Alerts', buttonTextIfHasDialog: 'Edit Alerts', dialogDivId: 'alert-dialog-BILL-442624-608', titleText: 'To get email alerts ', alertSourceType: ' legislation', alertMessageText: "You will receive an alert for any updates to actions, bill text, cosponsors, or summaries.", titleTextIfLoggedIn: 'Get email alerts ', titleTextAddendum: 'for this', titleTextIfHasAlert: 'Cancel this alert?', showEditDialogue: 'true', editAlertDialogTitle: 'Track Changes - Choose one or more (Optional) Help ', hideEditLink: 'false', dataSet: '', countLimitReached: 'false', cannotAddNewAlertDialogTitle: 'Cannot add new alert', cannotAddNewAlertDialogMessage: '' }); });

More on This Bill

Subject — policy area:, give feedback on this bill.

• Contact Your Member

Summary: H.R.4471 — 118th Congress (2023-2024) All Information (Except Text)

There is one summary for H.R.4471. Bill summaries are authored by CRS .

Shown Here: Introduced in House (07/06/2023)

Speech Privacy Act of 2023

This bill prohibits, with certain exceptions, any entity of the federal government from collecting or requiring the submission of information on the identification of any donor to a tax-exempt organization. It also prohibits an entity from disclosing to the public information identifying a donor.

Illocutionary Act

Making an Explicit Point

Jim Kruger / Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In speech-act theory , the term illocutionary act refers to the use of a sentence to express an attitude with a certain function or "force," called an  illocutionary force , which differs from locutionary acts in that they carry a certain urgency and appeal to the meaning and direction of the speaker. 

Although illocutionary acts are commonly made explicit by the use of performative verbs  like "promise" or "request," they can often be vague as in someone saying "I'll be there," wherein the audience cannot ascertain whether the speaker has made a promise or not.

In addition, as Daniel R. Boisvert observes in "Expressivism, Nondeclarative, and Success-Conditional Semantics" that we can use sentences to "warn, congratulate, complain, predict, command, apologize, inquire, explain, describe, request, bet, marry, and adjourn, to list just a few specific kinds of illocutionary act."

The terms illocutionary act and illocutionary force were introduced by British linguistic philosopher John Austin in 1962's "How to Do Things With Words, and for some scholars, the term illocutionary act is virtually synonymous with speech act .

Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts

Acts of speech can be broken down into three categories: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. In each of these, too, the acts can either be direct or indirect, which quantify how effective they are at conveying the speaker's message to its intended audience.

According to Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay's "Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics," locutionary acts are "the mere act of producing some linguistic sounds or marks with a certain meaning and reference," but these are the least effective means of describing the acts, merely an umbrella term for the other two which can occur simultaneously.

Speech acts can therefore further be broken down into illocutionary and perlocutionary wherein the illocutionary act carries a directive for the audience, such as promising, ordering, apologizing and thanking. Perlocutionary acts, on the other hand, bring about consequences to the audiences such as saying "I will not be your friend." In this instance, the impending loss of friendship is an illocutionary act while the effect of frightening the friend into compliance is a perlocutionary act.

Relationship Between Speaker and Listener

Because perlocutionary and illocutionary acts depend on the audience's reaction to a given speech, the relationship between speaker and listener is important to understand in the context of such acts of speech.

Etsuko Oishi wrote in "Apologies," that "the importance of the speaker's intention in performing an illocutionary act is unquestionable, but, in communication , the utterance becomes an illocutionary act only when the hearer takes the utterance as such." By this, Oishi means that although the speaker's act may always be an illocutionary one, the listener can choose to not interpret that way, therefore redefining the cognitive configuration of their shared outer world.

Given this observation, the old adage "know your audience" becomes especially relevant in understanding discourse theory, and indeed in composing a good speech or speaking well in general. In order for the illocutionary act to be effective, the speaker must use language which his or her audience will understand as intended.

• Speech Acts in Linguistics
• What Is The Speech Act Theory: Definition and Examples
• Locutionary Act Definition in Speech-Act Theory
• Perlocutionary Act Speech
• Illocutionary Force in Speech Theory
• Performative Verbs
• Mental-State Verbs
• Felicity Conditions: Definition and Examples
• What Is Entailment in Semantics?
• What Is a Minor Sentence?
• Appropriateness in Communication
• Definition and Examples of Sarcasm
• The Power of Indirectness in Speaking and Writing
• The Four Master Tropes in Rhetoric
• Definition and Examples of Linguistic Accommodation
• Definition and Examples of Metanoia