speech act meaning in oral communication

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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 .

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Speech Acts and Conversation

Language use: functional approaches to syntax, language in use, sentence structure and the function of utterances, speech acts, the cooperative principle, violations of the cooperative principles, politeness conventions, speech events, the organization of conversation, cross-cultural communication.

• 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.

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10 Speech Acts

Stephen C. Levinson is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is the author of over 270 publications on language and cognition, including the books Politeness (Cambridge University Press, 1987, with Penelope Brown), Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Presumptive Meanings(MIT Press, 2000), Space in language and cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and has edited the collections (with D. Wilkins) Grammars of space (Cambridge University Press), (with M. Bowerman) Language acquisition and conceptual development (Cambridge University Press), (with P. Jaisson) Culture and evolution (MIT Press), (with N. Enfield) Roots of sociality (Berg), (with P. Lee), new edition of Language, thought, and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (MIT Press). His current research is focused on the cognitive foundations for communication, and the relation of language to general cognition. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea and has received a 5–year ERC Advanced Grant in 2011.

• Published: 07 March 2016
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The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation.

10.1 Introduction

The concept of speech act is one of the most important notions in pragmatics. The term denotes the sense in which utterances are not mere meaning-bearers, but rather in a very real sense do things, that is, perform actions. This is clear from a number of simple observations:

utterances in conversation (and that is the only kind considered in this article) respond not to the shape or meaning of what was said, but to the underlying ‘point’ or action performed by the prior turn at talk, which might have been expressed in any number of ways;

utterances often have non-verbal counterparts (cf. waving to saying hello; bidding at auction by hand or voice);

utterances interdigitate with non-verbal actions in action sequences (cf. ordering a sandwich in a service encounter);

utterances have real-world consequences just like non-verbal actions (a $1,000 bid at an auction commits you to paying; saying you have nothing to declare in an airport can get you a big fine).

These actions are on a different ontological plane than the actions of the vocal organs in speech, which of course activate the motor cortex just as much as reaching for a glass—speech acts are more like moves in chess, whose meanings are circumscribed by rules and expectations. Trying to understand how utterances can have these abstract action-like properties, how they are coded linguistically, and how we recognize them are some of the core issues in this domain.

Despite the fact that speech acts are clearly central to an understanding of language use, they have been largely off the linguistics agenda since the 1980s. As is often the case in science, research on speech acts boomed for a little over a decade (in the 1970s and 1980s), and then went out of fashion without the most fundamental issues being resolved at all. Amongst these unanswered questions are: How many types are there, and are they universal or culturally specific? How are they expressed in language? And how are they recognized or attributed in actual language use? These questions are addressed in sections 10.3–10.9 below.

10.2 A Brief History of the Concepts Leading to the Current State of the Art

In philosophy of language during the 1930s and 1940s the picture theory of meaning, and the broader correspondence theory of truth, began to be challenged by theories of language use being developed by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin in Oxford. It is Austin who is usually credited with the first developed theory of speech acts, although his influential lectures ‘How to do things with words’ were not published until 1962 after his death ( Austin 1962a ). Austin took the view that philosophy of language had wrongly concentrated on statements, or even just propositions, and in doing so had lost track of what language is mostly used for. Rather, he claimed, utterances attempt to do things, and just like other actions can fail for a range of reasons. He catalogued the kinds of actions performed, by noting that most speech acts (however colloquially expressed) can be paraphrased in the normal form ‘I hereby V performative ’ where a delimited set of verbs like order, promise, warn, congratulate could appear. He also classified the reasons for success or failure of speech acts, dubbed ‘felicity conditions’, noting that they often require appropriate subjective states (later called ‘sincerity conditions’ by Searle) as well as appropriate circumstances (Searle’s ‘preparatory conditions’). In this sort of way all the reasons for my bid at Christie’s for a Picasso not succeeding (I am not a registered bidder, lack the funds, don’t succeed in getting the attention of the auctioneer, etc.) can be spelled out. Speech acts can be understood on the analogy of ceremonies, like marriage or toasting the monarch’s health—in the same sort of way they are conventional arrangements for creating new states of affairs, and consequently are in principle open-ended in kind. Austin went on to notice that these success conditions not only parallel truth conditions, but actually subsume them; statements are therefore just a special class of speech acts with sincerity conditions of belief and presuppositions or preparatory conditions that must also be met. He also went to some pains to clarify all the different senses in which actions could be said to be performed by utterances: the ‘locutionary act’ is the saying of the words with the intended meanings, the ‘illocutionary act (or force)’ is the speech act proper (ordering, advising, warning, etc.), and the ‘perlocutionary act’ is the further act or consequences that are context-specific and not part of the specific conventions invoked (e.g. by asking your advice I might flatter you). Austin also developed a number of notions whose importance was not immediately realized—for example, the concept of ‘uptake’ (the ratified receipt and recognition by a recipient).

Austin’s work was influentially systematized by John Searle (1969) , who connected the theory to sociology and jurisprudence on the one hand (speech acts are built as constitutive rules, whereby doing X counts as constituting a new state of affairs, like scoring a goal, or being guilty of a specific crime), and to linguistics on the other hand. Noting, following Hare (1952) , that the same propositional content could occur across speech acts (as in ‘Pass the exam’, ‘Did you pass the exam?’, ‘Good luck with the exam’), he added a ‘propositional content condition’, so that the felicity conditions together now effectively defined the speech act. He went on to suggest that an exhaustive typology of speech acts could be arrived at by clustering types of felicity conditions, so that there can be seen to be just five main types: representatives (statements and the like), directives (questions, requests, orders), commissives (threats, promises, offers), expressives (thanking, apologizing, congratulating, etc.), and declarations (like christening, declaring war, firing, etc. which rely on elaborate institutional backgrounds). Searle’s theory was well articulated and proved attractive to linguists, as recounted below.

Meanwhile, other philosophers took a more psychological view of language use, chief among them Grice and Strawson, who both thought that speech acts should be thought about as specific classes of intention, e.g. intentions to cause beliefs in addressees, or intentions to get them to do things. Grice ( 1957 , 1975 ) reconstructed the notion of meaning along these lines, and characterized the use of language in conversation as guided by rational action between partners. Although he never laid this out in print, it is clear that he thought that felicity conditions simply follow from the specific classes of intention: if I want to get you to pass the water by saying ‘Could you pass the water?’, it would simply be irrational if I didn’t want the water, if the water is not in your reach, if you are deaf or otherwise preoccupied. This intentional perspective was followed up by work in natural-language processing that related speech act recognition to plan recognition (see section 10.7 ).

During the period of generative semantics, linguists became increasingly interested in language usage and how sentences might encode aspects of the contexts in which they are used. Searle and other theorists had not concentrated on the actualities of speech act coding, presuming instead that illocutionary force is coded in the major sentence types (imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives) and in the explicit performative verbs when so used—these would be the ‘literal illocutionary forces’ of utterances. But as any practical grammarian of English or other languages knows, in fact one has to learn idiomatic means of expressing speech acts. Gordon and Lakoff (1971) noted for the first time that ‘indirect speech acts’ could also routinely be expressed by querying or stating a felicity condition: ‘Do you need that pencil?’, ‘Could I have that pencil’, ‘Is that your pencil?’, ‘I’d like that pencil’ all query or state a precondition on requesting. They also noted that adverbials like please or frankly might force a particular speech act reading (as in ‘Please could we begin on time?’). There followed a large literature on indirect speech acts, investigating the forms used especially for requests across cultures, the psychological processing (indirect speech acts seemed to be processed without any complex detour through a literal meaning), and the politeness reasons for the mismatch between direct and indirect speech act coding. By the end of the 1980s, however, linguistic interests had moved largely elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a completely different approach, unrelated to the linguistic and philosophical traditions, was being taken in sociology, where the empirical study of conversation was being born in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unencumbered by theory, the conversation analysts (Harvey Sacks, Manny Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson especially) were observing all sorts of fundamental organizations for interactive language use: turn-taking, repair, and sequence organization (see e.g. Schegloff and Sacks 1973 , Schegloff 2007a , and this volume ). In doing so, they were finding speech acts that had no vernacular names, no associated performative verbs or (it seems) special markings, for example pre-closings (e.g. the exchange of well s before goodbyes in phone calls), assessments (evaluations of shared events or things), repair initiators (like excuse me? ), pre-invitations ( What are you doing on Friday night? ), and so forth. Such actions (as the conversational analysts call them, treated here as equivalent to the notion of speech act) can only be understood against the background of sequential position—that is, where they come with relation to prior or following turns. Despite the fact that many observations have now accrued about the sets of actions and their sequential placement, little systematic theory about actions has emerged from this work (for a survey see Levinson 2013a ; Drew 2013 ).

Although this brief review cannot do justice to the extensive work that has been done in the different disciplines interested in speech acts (linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis) (see Levinson 1983 , 2013a ), it serves as a pointer to the state of the art. There is general acceptance of the importance of the subject, but little recent research that advances our understanding of the fundamental questions.

10.3 The Essential Insight and the Leading Issues

In contrast to the emphasis in modern linguistics on language as a device for an endless sound–meaning correspondence, J. L. Austin’s core insight was that the central function of language is not to deliver meanings but to deliver speech acts. For the core ecological niche for language, and still its primary use and the locus of its acquisition, is conversation. Each of us produces on average perhaps 16 000 words and 1200 turns at talk a day—and each turn delivers a speech act: all in all we are participating in exchanges with something like 5000 speech act moves a day. In order to respond on time (within the c .200 ms allowed by the turn-taking system; Stivers et al. 2009 ) we need to decode or attribute speech acts at lightning speed, because it is the illocutionary force, not the meaning, that we primarily respond to. One of the central puzzles is that speech acts are not for the most part simply or directly coded in the linguistic form: for example, Where are you going? could be an idle question, or a challenge, or a reprimand, or a prelude (a pre-) to a request for a ride or to an offer to give you a ride, and the relevant response depends on the correct attribution. How then are speech acts recognized in the tight time-frame allowed? Is there a finite list of possible action types, or can they be created de novo ? Further, as just illustrated, an utterance or turn can perform more than one action simultaneously: in asking a question ( Where are you going? ) the speaker could also be transparently performing a pre-request in such a way that the addressee can make an offer in next turn ( Downtown, would you like a ride? ). How many acts can be performed at once?

These then are the central puzzles in this area, to be taken up below. Faced with these difficulties, to which current research yields no definitive answers, it is tempting for linguistic theory to simply hand over the can of worms to some other discipline (conversation analysis, for example) as e.g. Bierwisch (1980) recommended. However, as discussed in section 10.8 , there is a substantial intersection of speech acts and linguistic structure, which makes the topic of central importance for e.g. the study of syntax. Usage and structure in fact go hand in hand.

10.4 The Nature of the Beast: Identifying Speech Acts

In this section we consider the problem of identifying and cataloguing speech acts, given some problematic properties, like their implicit character and non-one-to-one mapping onto utterances.

There are four (three basic and one related) approaches to identifying or characterizing speech acts. First, one could rely on natural metalanguage, as in English offer, request, invitation, greeting , and so on. Austin’s own tack here, recollect, was to do the lexicography of performative verbs ( I hereby declare/choose/delegate/promise/undertake/bequeath … ). But there are many reasons to distrust natural metalanguage. Many speech acts have no vernacular names (such actions as pre-invitations, continuers, repair initiators, and the like), as discovered by the conversational analysts. In addition, while written languages often have large metalanguage resources of this kind, unwritten ones often do not, and they may have speech acts alien to us. So natural language terms are a poor guide.

A second approach is the use of felicity conditions to characterize speech acts, as in classical speech act theory. A problem here is that taken as necessary conditions jointly sufficient to define speech acts, it is hard to specify them right. Thus the conditions for genuine information-seeking questions, exam questions, questions checking facts, and questions used in repair will all be subtly different—they form a loose family of speech act types not easily captured by a definitive checklist of conditions.

A third approach favoured by conversation analysts is to use the character of responses to identify prior actions. For example, if a range of utterances X–Y–Z are all immediately responded to by fellow interactants passing the speaker something, then prima facie X–Y–Z are requests. The observation is that many speech acts come in pairs (‘adjacency pairs’), with an initiating action having a characteristic response, as in greetings followed by greetings, offers by acceptances (or declinings), questions by answers, and so forth ( Schegloff 2007a ; Stivers 2013 ). Thus if one can independently characterize the responding action, one can type the eliciting action. Conversation analysts argue that this is how we check that we are understood—we expect a response of a certain type. Consider, the following example, where the response marked by thanks and excuses suggests that for B , A’s turn appears to have been an offer, though that is not obvious from its structure or content:

A fourth, related approach is to appreciate that an utterance gets parts of its identity from the sequential position it occupies. Consider the following tokens of the utterance Okay , each doing entirely different things (labelled here with the action codings used in conversation analysis—see Schegloff 2007a ):

One aspect of speech acts thus highlighted is that they are necessarily interactional in character. Consider a proposal (say about going for a walk together)—for success, the action depends on the uptake: it takes two to tango. This is a fundamental aspect of speech acts neglected in Searlian analysis—almost all speech acts are joint actions ( Clark 1996 ). 1

Most analysis actually makes use of all four of these different kinds of identifying properties, trading on our vernacular terminology, trying to tighten it up by defining criteria, considering how participants themselves respond to utterances, and noting how utterances play different roles depending on their positioning vis-à-vis other speech acts.

10.5 The Inventory and its Universality

A natural question is how many kinds of speech acts are there? The question presumes a level of abstraction away from the specific propositional content, which may of course be unique: it’s a question about how many types of illocutionary force exist. Austin suggested an open-ended list, convention-based, so cultural in nature. In contrast Grice (in unpublished work: Grice 1973 ; see also Schiffer 1972 ) had suggested that complex speech act types could be built up from the two propositional attitudes of wanting and judging. His target was the ‘moods’ expressed in the major sentence types, namely declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives. Most languages grammatically code at least two of these, which could be taken as a hint of a cross-cultural core of basic speech acts. However it is moot whether these forms really code speech acts since they are in practice used for diverse action types, while other minor sentence types like English expressives more directly code for force (see section 10.6 ). But the idea that speech acts fall into classes of intention is persistent (see e.g. Tomasello 2008 ).

Searle, taking an intermediate position, has argued that there are in fact just five large classes of things one can do with language—five major speech act types. The classification uses three parameters: the ‘essential conditions’ (Searle’s term for the intentional goal), the sincerity conditions, and ‘direction of fit’ (whether the words copy the world as in statements or the world copies the words as in promises). Searle’s classes are representatives (assertion-like), directives (questioning, requesting, etc.), commissives (promising, threatening, offering), expressives (thanking, apologizing, etc.), and declarations (blessing, christening, etc., which rely on special institutional backgrounds).

Searle’s classification cannot however be exhaustive. First it fails to accommodate many of the actions noted by the conversation analysts (e.g. the continuer hmhm , the pre-s, the repair initiators and the repair responses, and so forth). Second, it is culture-bound. Consider the following exchange simplified and in translation from the language Yélî Dnye ( Levinson 2005 ):

This is an adjacency pair of a special kind peculiar to this matrilineal Papuan culture, in which men make jokes by alluding to some unfortunate accident or event that befell the other man’s father-in-law, to which the response must be immediate and in kind (B’s father-in-law killed his wife and then himself with a bush-knife, while A’s father-in-law died falling from a mangrove tree; they are ostensibly commenting on a man yelling down a megaphone). These utterances are paired father-in-law jokes and they don’t describe states of affairs or express the feelings of the speakers or otherwise fall within Searle’s taxonomy. In addition, Searle’s classification is of course a higher-order grouping of types, so it will not help us understand the specifics of action and response in conversation.

Austin or Searle’s armchair classifications are based on intuitions about salient types of speech acts. These are nearly always first parts of (base) adjacency pairs (see Schegloff 2007a , this volume )—that is, the initiating actions (like questions, offers, invitations) to which responses are due (even then, many such initiatory actions have proved relatively unavailable to intuition, like repair initiators, continuers, assessments, and the like). But the actions that lead in to these initiators (e.g. pre-announcements, pre-closings) or the responses themselves (e.g. answers, agreements, continuers, counter-offers), or the actions that interpose between first part and second (e.g. clarification questions) escape proper treatment in classical speech act theory. Consider (with arrowed action labelling):

Describing line (1) as a question would miss its basic function, namely to check whether a news announcement should be made; line (2) makes clear it should (note the what ); line (3) sets up the topic of the announcement in such a way than no announcement proves necessary, for the recipient guesses in line (4). Thus although (1) and (2) could be said to be questions that is not their main function, which is as preliminaries to an announcement (see Levinson 1983 : 345–364; and Schegloff 2007a for more on pre-s). Recollect as mentioned above that conversation analysts have emphasized that it is the character of the response, or the locus in a sequence, that plays a major role in giving speech acts their identities.

To return to the central questions of this section: Is there a finite set of speech act types, and if so how big is it? The answers are that we really don’t know. Is the set universal in character? Not in the sense that all speech acts are pan-cultural (witness Yélî Dnye father-in-law jokes, or any of the institutionally circumscribed acts like finding guilty, proposing toasts, declaring war, etc.), but it is an open question as to whether there is a pan-cultural core with such plausibly general functions as telling, questioning, requesting, greeting, agreeing, or initiating repair.

10.6 The Multiple Action Problem

One particularly troubling feature of the mapping of speech acts onto utterances is that such a mapping is not necessarily, or even mostly, 1:1. Sometimes turns at talk have more than one constructional component, and each part can perform an action, as in the previous example (4) above and in (5):

But often a single constructional unit (whether or not it exhausts the turn) can do more than one action (as in (4) where Didju hear the terrible news? might be said to be a question, but carries with it the obligation to tell the news, conditional on the answer ‘no’). Consider the following example from a verbal tussle between a mother and her 14-year-old daughter Virginia wanting more allowance or pocket money:

Viriginia’s proposal is responded to by a question-like response, which has the form of an other-initiator of repair or OIR (i.e. is initiated by the responder, seeking repair on the prior turn). But it is a prosodically incredulous OIR, adumbrating an upcoming challenge (call it a pre-challenge), which after a go-ahead, is duly delivered ( Just to throw away? ) but again in the form of a question inviting repair. That extreme formulation of the question in turn prefigures a rejection (call the turn then a pre-rejection), and gets a defence. And so forth. But now notice we have multiple layers of function for each turn—up to four actions packed into the one subclausal turn in Just to throw away !

The question that arises is whether there is any limit to the number of actions that a single turn can bear. Notice that some of these might merely be a matter of granularity of description, e.g. a special kind of question is often used to ask for repair. But that is not the kind of relation between the question and, say, the challenge: notice how the response deals with both. The literature acknowledges the existence of turns performing two actions: on one account, a ‘literal speech act’ is used to deliver an ‘indirect speech act’ ( Searle 1975 ), and conversation analysts talk about one action being the vehicle for one other action ( Schegloff 2007a ). But there is no explanation for turns that perform three or more actions (see, however, the suggestions in terms of plan reconstruction at the end of the next section).

10.7 Bottom-Up and Top-Down Inference in Speech Act Recognition and Attribution

Speech acts, it has been suggested, are not easy to individuate or identify, are not known to come from a finite or universal set, and can be laminated one on top of another. These are problematic properties. But an even greater problem is how they are recognized (more properly attributed 2 ) under the extraordinary time pressures of spoken conversation (or any other interactional use of language). Here we concentrate on the comprehension problem. As already mentioned, on average across languages the gaps between turns are on the order of 200–300 ms ( Stivers et al. 2009 ; Levinson and Torreira 2015 ). Given that the fastest response from conception to word takes 600 + ms ( Levelt 1989 ; responses of any complexity, e.g. three or more words, take 900–1500 ms or more to prepare), it is clear that speakers in conversation predict the end of the incoming turn in order to launch their own response on time. But that response must ‘type’ the incoming turn, as e.g. a question, request, statement, before it has finished in order to compose the relevant response and launch it so it comes out on time. Probably this is done on average about halfway through the incoming turn (see Magyari et al. 2014 ).

This makes the speed at which speech acts are attributed appear quite miraculous. For, as already made clear, the coding of speech acts is for the most part not directly marked: most syntactic forms, even whole constructions like Why don’t you … , are multi-duty ( why don’t you turns out to code proposals, advice, invitations, and complaints, while Do you want codes requests, invitations, offers, and so forth; Couper-Kuhlen 2010 ).

Speech act recognition is similar to any perception problem, where pattern has to be discerned and categorized out of noise. Both ‘bottom-up’ information (in the signal) and ‘top-down’ information (expected categories) are usually involved, and the noisier the channel the greater the role for ‘top-down’ factors. Let us consider them in turn. Bottom-up information is whatever clues to speech act type can be found directly coded or cued in the signal, by lexical choice, construction, or prosody. Given the turn-taking facts, it is clear that signals early on in a turn are going to be more important than signals at the end of turns, since by then the choice of response must have already been made. This suggests that effective cues will be ‘front-loaded’, coming early in the turn (see Levinson 2013a ). Here the cross-linguistic facts are curious. Take the grammar of interrogatives, associated (though not exclusively) with the illocutionary force of questioning. First, wh - or content interrogatives are only grammatically initial in about one third of languages ( Dryer 2011b ); however, this is the dominant single strategy since the alternative positions are various, and Dryer notes that only ‘a few languages exhibit at least a weak tendency to place interrogative phrases at the end of sentences’ (he mentions two out of a sample of 900 languages). These facts are in line with the ‘front-loading’ prediction from the psycholinguistic facts, but only as a tendency. The prediction would be that languages with late (right-located) wh - words would have developed compensatory cues like prosody or particles positioned earlier in the clause.

Second, take polar (yes/no) questions ( Dryer 2011a ). The commonest coding strategy (60 per cent of languages) is by particle, and of these about 30 per cent are in initial or second position; however the commonest position of particles is final (50 per cent of all particle types). It is worth noting, however, that 30 per cent of languages have no lexical or morphosyntactic coding at all for polar questions, relying solely on intonation or prosody. These facts do not seem to be in line with the ‘front-loading’ expectation. Further light is thrown on these issues by studies of usage in corpora. In a study of ten languages, we found that those sentence-final particles are omitted or absent 40 per cent of the time in Lao and 70 per cent in Korean ( Enfield et al. 2010 ); two of the languages lacked any coding (including prosodic); and morphosyntactic coding as in English inversion is also mostly omitted. One can conclude that polar-question marking must carry low functional load, wherever it is located. These usage studies also showed that interrogatives (whether content or polar) only perform the function of seeking new information about 30 per cent of the time; around 40 per cent of them are involved in repair or checking or confirming just-given information, and the remaining 30 per cent perform many different functions, including offers, requests, and so on.

To summarize so far: there is no one-to-one match of form to function. Even where apparently dedicated morphosyntactic machinery exists to code speech acts (as in interrogatives), the coding may be omitted: about 60–70 per cent (in various corpora) of English polar questions are unmarked declaratives in form, and do not carry rising intonation ( Geluykens 1988 ). Cross-linguistically, the tendency is for two thirds or more of all questions (in a broad sense) to be polar questions (unpublished data from Stivers et al. 2009 ). Even though wh - or content questions would seem to require a wh -form, this is not necessarily true; many languages have indefinite quantifiers that double as interrogative words, and many allow gaps to code the variable (as in John is going to _? instead of Where is John going? ).

There are then distinct limits to the bottom-up coding and inference of speech act force. Nevertheless, some detailed studies suggest that underlying the apparent many-to-many correspondences between utterance forms and speech acts there might be a clockwork system. For example, in a study of requests in English telephone calls, it was found that the Can you/Could you/Would you … forms are used for requests where the speaker has clear rights or entitlements and knows what the request would involve; where the entitlements are low and the contingencies involved less clear, the I wonder if form is preferred ( Drew and Curl 2008 ). This suggests that where multiple forms are available, they may each carry subtly different presuppositions about background conditions.

Nevertheless, it is more likely that the cues to illocutionary force are multiple and probabilistic in character. Indeed, there is now considerable work in natural-language processing (NLP) that seems to show this. This work takes speech corpora, usually from task-oriented dialogues, and tags them by hand with a very constrained set of speech act categories that seem to reflect the functions in each particular corpus. Machine-learning algorithms are then trained on a subcorpus, inducing the association between surface cues—lexical items, phrases, or intonation—and the pre-coded tags. The algorithm is then let loose on the rest of the corpus to see how well it emulates the human tagging. So, for example, it was found that ‘assessments’ (value judgements like ‘That was great’ that usually call for a response in kind) have quite restricted elements ( Goodwin 1996 ): that as subject in 80 per cent of cases, intensifiers really or pretty , and adjectives drawn from a short list including great, good, nice, wonderful … etc. ( Jurafsky 2004 ). So a combination (an unstructured list) of surface cues may be a crude but very effective trigger for speech act categorization: the chances of being an assessment given just one cue like really might be low, but in combination with that and great may be greatly increased. This would be just the kind of low-level associative process that could rapidly deliver probabilities of speech act assignment in comprehension, and since these cues are distributed throughout the turn, an incoming turn could be incrementally classified with increasing certainty.

Turning to top-down information, this includes all the accumulated contextual and sequential information that forms the niche for the incoming turn. For example, in service encounters, the goals for speaker and addressee will be largely pre-set, so that an utterance like Do you have coffee to go? can be understood directly as a request. In free conversation, though, the context is usually more local. One factor of constant relevance is the current state of the common ground between participants. We noted earlier that polar questions in English and many other languages are typically unmarked, and thus have the shape and often the prosody of declaratives. How then can they be understood as questions? As Labov and Fanshel (1977) pointed out, the recognition is done on the basis of knowledge asymmetry: thus You’re hungry is likely to be understood as a question, while You’re smart is likely to be interpreted as a compliment. Statements about what the other knows best are candidate questions, and this explains how a fifth of languages can do without any lexical or morphosyntactic marking of polar questions (prosody may often help of course, but in some languages it seems never to play this role; see e.g. Levinson (2010) on Yélî Dnye or Dryer (2011a) on Chalcatongo Mixtec). Epistemic asymmetry or symmetry is such a strong indicator that it can overrule interrogative marking: thus Isn’t it a beautiful day is not likely to be interpreted as a question, since we can all be presumed to have access to the weather. Heritage (2012) argues that epistemic status trumps question marking in all cases.

A second always relevant factor is sequential location in the sequence of turns. The power of sequential location to map illocutionary force onto utterances can be appreciated from a number of angles. Consider as a limiting case silence, where there is literally no signal, yet the silence can imply a response, as in the following example where the two-second silence is taken to imply ‘no’ and functions to block a forthcoming request:

The inference relies on the ‘conditional relevance’ of a second pair part and on the principle that dispreferred responses are typically delayed or mitigated. Another way to appreciate the power of sequence to attribute speech act force is to consider cases where ambiguities arise, as in the following example (8) where the arrowed turn is ambiguous ( Schegloff 1988 ). It could be a straight question, or it could be a pre-announcement—that is, an offer to tell conditional on the recipient indicating that he doesn’t know the indicated news. Note that the question force is not the ‘literal force’ (a question about knowledge), but a question about who is going. Pre-announcements often have this form (cf. Do you know the joke about the plumber? ) and the pre-announcement reading is encouraged by the context, where Russ had produced a pre-announcement just before in the first line, and Mom could be reciprocating in kind. The ambiguity comes about because both readings are salient in the context.

A related type of high-level information can also be brought to bear on the interpretation of a turn, namely an assessment of how the turn fits into the likely goal structure or plan of the speaker. For this is the inference schema we use to understand any sequence of actions: if you are sitting opposite and grasp your mug and lift it up, I’ll expect you to put it to your mouth and take a drink. The sub-actions I see (grasping the mug, lifting it) are preconditions to the action I infer (taking a sip), and seeing the initial parts I can make the metonymic inference to the whole. Interestingly, the same pattern of inference works for speech acts. Consider the following service encounter in example (9), where a precondition to buying pecan Danish pastries is queried, and the seller responds both to the question and the underlying request.

Notice however that no request has been issued, so how exactly does this work? Consider the analysis sketched in (10), in terms of customer C’s plans and the seller S’s reconstruction of them from the first utterance in the sequence. From Do you have pecan Danish today the seller can infer that this is a precondition on asking for some, therefore the request is likely to follow—given which the seller can truncate the sequence as she does, by responding to the foreseeable forthcoming request (in the dotted box in the figure in (10)). It is this projected request that gives Do you have pecan Danish today its pre-request flavour; in this way speech acts can acquire multiple actions mapped onto one turn by virtue of projectable next actions.

Notice this account explains why mentioning a felicity condition on a speech act is one way of performing that speech act (this is the classical theory of ‘indirect speech acts’, as in Searle 1975 ). But it has much wider application. Consider the telephone exchange in (11): the caller C in line 3 queries what the recipient is doing, which is a potential prequel to an invitation. The response in line 4 not only answers the query but at the same makes clear that there is no impediment to an invitation, thus projecting an acceptance. The lamination of actions throughout this sequence is straightforwardly explicable in terms of current action plus foreseeable next action, as sketched in the figure in (12).

The virtues of this mode of analysis become especially clear when one considers cases like the following where the main actions are projected, but never actually performed.

Here there is no feasible ‘indirect speech act’ in terms of classical felicity conditions: there is rather an indication of a predicament which would have an obvious solution, while the recipient produces an account for why the obvious solution cannot be performed. In the same sort of way, in example (6), Mom’s Just to throw away? performs four actions, as question, repair initiator, challenge, and pre-rejection because it is transparent that Mom intends to resist Virginia’s claim for more weekly pocket money by countering Virginia’s every move. Neither indirect speech act theory nor the conversation analyst’s notion of one action being the ‘vehicle’ for another (as in Schegloff 2007a ) can explain this kind of quadruple depth of speech act lamination on a single turn.

Plan reconstruction as an account of speech act comprehension was first advanced by Allen (1979) and Cohen and Perrault (1979) and applied to the problem of indirect speech acts by Allen and Perrault (1980) (see also Clark 1979 , Levinson 1981 ). These approaches in classical Artificial Intelligence style make use of the heavily intentional approach favoured by Grice and reviewed in section 10.1 , cranking through a calculus of desire and belief to arrive at a final ‘indirect speech act’ ( Cohen et al. 1990 ). The insights can be understood, however, in a slightly different way, in terms of an utterance being designed to reveal, variously, the whole or part of the iceberg of underlying interactional goals, where projectable next turns serve to laminate one or more ‘indirect speech acts’ onto the current turn.

Both bottom-up cues, which may be just probabilistic associations of linguistic features and speech acts, together with top-down factors like the role of sequence, epistemic asymmetries, and plan attribution, almost certainly play a role together in speech act comprehension. Curiously, cases where interlocutors misunderstand one another as in (8) are vanishingly rare. But there is no complete model of how these various kinds of information come together in action attribution.

10.8 Syntax, Sentence Types, and the Grammar of Speech Acts

We return now to the grammar of speech acts. We’ve noted that in general there is no one-to-one mapping between form and function. This is especially true of the ‘big three’ sentence types, declarative, interrogative, and imperative, which are probably best seen as carrying a very general semantics (e.g. a wh- interrogative expresses an open proposition with a blank constituent, which is why the same form may double as an indefinite expression in many languages). However, as discussed above under the rubric of cues, there can be many surface elements that will help to narrow down an illocutionary force. There are for example adverbs like please that unambiguously mark requests or pleadings, adverbs like obviously or frankly that mark statements ( Gordon and Lakoff 1971 ), and interjections like Wow, My God that mark exclamations. In addition there are minor sentence types that are indeed specialized for illocutionary force ( Sadock and Zwicky 1985 ). A classic case are exclamatives, where English has rich specialized constructional resources as in What a beautiful day!, That it should come to this!, Why, if it isn’t the trouble maker!, You and your linguistics!, Of all the stupid things to do!, To think I nearly won a medal! (well described in grammars like Quirk et al. 1989 ). Exclamatives are a category of some typological interest (see Michaelis 2001 , who defines them semantically and finds them often coded in quasi-interrogative or topic constructions or NP complements). Similarly, English codes wishes as optatives ( If only I’d done it, May the best man win, Oh to be in England ), and suggestions or proposals in special forms ( How about joining us?, What if you came earlier?, Let’s go, Why not have a drink? ). Many other languages have their own specialized forms for warnings, blessings, and the like. Unfortunately, studies of the usages of these forms are still few and far between, so we cannot be sure they are as specialized in usage as the grammars suggest—but it is an important subject for future research.

10.9 Conclusions—The Centrality of Speech Acts

The central function of language, it has been argued, is to deliver speech acts ( Searle 1972 ). The rest of the linguistic apparatus, with all of its complex syntax and propositional structure, is there to serve this purpose. For speech acts are the coin of conversation, and conversation the core niche for language use and acquisition. A retort might be that the central function of missiles is to target explosives, but this doesn’t help one understand much about the inner complex engineering of a missile—the outer function can be remote from design details, partly because there may be innumerable different engineering solutions that would answer the same function. Linguistics then would be effectively autonomous from the study of speech acts. What has been argued here, however, is that such a disjunction is unlikely to be tenable. First, language design has to accommodate to the tight constraints of conversation, so that speech acts have to be decoded early partly from bottom-up aspects of the signal—hence constructions of many different kinds serve this purpose, if often in a non-deterministic way. Second, the very clausal structure of language is almost certainly due to the tight turn constraints into which sentences must fit, where each turn must deliver at least one speech act. Third, whatever one’s views on the origin of language, short turns delivering speech acts were almost certainly a design feature of protolanguage—languages have evolved within this ecological niche, spinning complexity in the tight confines of the turn.

Another way to appreciate the centrality of speech acts in language design is to appreciate how many of the features we think of as most intimately connected to language structure are actually also exhibited in the sequential organization of speech acts. Consider recursion, argued by Chomsky ( 2007 , 2010 ) to be the most central design feature exclusive to language. Now consider that the clearest type of recursion, namely centre-embedding, is restricted in language to just two, occasionally three, levels of nesting. Karlsson (2007) found no examples of triple embedding in huge corpora, and just 13 in the whole history of Western literature; for spoken language, the limit is two. Since small numbers of centre-embeddings can easily be modelled with a finite state device, there is poor evidence for the need for phrase structure grammars here. Yet centre-embedding within discourse shows none of these limits, and is sufficiently multiple and routine to provide a much better basis for escalation to phrase structure grammars. Here is a simple example of one-degree centre-embedding:

Since this can be recursively elaborated, we could express the indefinite recursion by the rule: Q&A →Q (Q&A) A (Levinson 1981 , 2006 ; Koschmann 2010 ). The following shows an example with degree-three internal embedding (each level numbered), a level exceeding all syntactic embedding in spoken languages (the speech acts, or adjacency pairs, here relevant are request + compliance, question + answer, and two repair initiator + repairs).

It is easy to show that degree-six or more centre-embedding occurs in spoken dialogue (see Levinson 2013b ). When one finds a domain where a capacity is more evolved than in another domain, there is reason to assume that it has a longer evolutionary history. While short-term memory constraints are often invoked to explain our failure to produce centre-embedding in syntax, these do not seem to be a constraint in the interactive domain. This would suggest that linguistic recursion at least partly originates from this type of push-down stack in action sequencing, which as far as we know is universal in dialogue. Incidentally, it is also possible to show that cross-serial dependencies can be found in the sequential structure of speech acts, showing once again that complexity attributed to syntax may be more easily found in dialogue structure. All in all, a better case can be made for the need to climb the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars based on speech acts in dialogue than on syntactic structure.

For all the reasons outlined in this article, speech acts are a fundamentally important area of study in the language sciences. Work in this domain has been relatively, and inexplicably, neglected since the 1970s and 1980s, and it is time for a renaissance of work on speech acts and their use in dialogue. 3

A possible exception are ‘outlouds’ or ‘response cries’ like private exclamations ( Goffman 1978 ), which may be produced with or without an audience, but by definition without an addressee.

‘Recognition’ presupposes correct attribution that matches speaker intent, but since we are interested in the comprehension process which will include occasional misattributions, ‘attribution’ is the more accurate term.

My thanks to Penelope Brown and Kobin Kendrick for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Speech Acts: Conventions and Intentions

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The praxeological approach understands communication as a sub-category of human action—the conscious aiming at ends and intentional utilisation of communicative means for the attainment of goals in social world. This approach corresponds to the views of speech act theory, which suggests that certain communicative actions—performatives—function normatively within a structured system of communication. Such performative speech acts possess “illocutionary force”, which enables them to accomplish things with normative consequences. Speech act theory and praxeology seem to be in accord on multiple issues, including the notions of the requirements of meeting both external and internal conditions (maintaining necessary social conventions and mental states accordingly) in order for a performative to succeed. However, not all performatives create normative (and legal) effects; instead, they can be viewed as a continuum. In addition, a necessary distinction must be made between felicitous and infelicitous performatives, as well as communicative actions that are not performatives at all.

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Throughout this book, I will use the terms “speech” and “communication” interchangeably (with the term “speech act” being the equivalent of “communicative act”), reflecting the idea that contemporary speech act theory encompasses written, spoken and non-verbal discourse.

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Speech Acts

We are attuned in everyday conversation not primarily to the sentences we utter to one another, but to the speech acts that those utterances are used to perform: requests, warnings, invitations, promises, apologies, predictions, and the like. Such acts are staples of communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century. [ 1 ] Since that time “speech act theory” has become influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory, and feminist thought among other scholarly disciplines. [ 2 ] Recognition of the significance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare a normative structure implicit in linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

2.1 the independence of force and content, 2.2 can saying make it so, 2.3 theories of performativity, 3.1 direction of fit, 3.2 conditions of satisfaction, 3.3 seven components of illocutionary force, 3.4 direct and indirect force, 4.1 force conventionalism, 4.2 a biosemantic species of force conventionalism.

• 4.3 An Intentionalist Alternative to Force Conventionalism

5.1 Grice's Account of Speaker Meaning

5.2 objections to grice's account, 5.3 force as an aspect of speaker meaning, 6.1 speech acts and conversations, 6.2 speech acts and scorekeeping, 7. force-indicators and the logically perfect language, 8. do speech acts have a logic, 9. speech acts and social issues, further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions was a paradigm for many philosophers in the Twentieth Century. One reason is that it suggested a way to respond to longstanding philosophical problems by showing them to be specious. Russell argued that such sentences as ‘The present King of Singapore is bald,’ and, ‘The round square is impossible,’ possess superficial grammatical forms that are misleading as to their underlying logical structure. In so doing he showed how such sentences can be meaningful without this fact obliging us to posit current Singaporean monarchs or round squares. Many philosophers in what came to be known as the Ordinary Language movement were inspired by this achievement to argue that classic philosophical problems (e.g., of free will, the relation of mind to body, truth, the nature of knowledge, and of right and wrong) likewise rested on a misunderstanding of the language in which these problem are couched. In How to Do Things with Words , J.L. Austin for instance writes,

…in recent years, many things which would once have been accepted without question as ‘statements’ by both philosophers and grammarians have been scrutinized with new care… It has come to be commonly held that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts…Along these lines it has by now been shown piecemeal, or at least made to look likely, that many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake-the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which are either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different. Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions…it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy. (Austin 1962, pp. 1–2)

The Ordinary Language movement, with its broad claim that the meaning of an expression should be equated with its use, and its desire to transcend traditional philosophical perplexities, did not achieve the revolution of which Austin speaks. Nonetheless one of its enduring legacies is the notion of a speech act.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language and linguistics. Accordingly in this entry we will consider the relations among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions , and implicature . This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

Above I shuddered with quotation marks around the expression ‘speech act theory’. It is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their most significant features. Consider a different case. Much of semantic theory deserves its name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By contrast, it is less clear that “speech act theory” has comparable credentials. One such credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there be. To that end I briefly consider the possibility, envisioned by some, of an “illocutionary logic”. For similar reasons I close with a discussion of the bearing of speech acts on current debates about freedom of speech.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Whereas an act of speech is any act of uttering [ 3 ] meaningful words, ‘speech act’ is a term of art. As a first approximation, speech acts are those acts that can (though need not) be performed by saying that one is doing so. On this conception, resigning, promising, asserting and asking are all speech acts, while convincing, insulting and growing six inches are not. One can, for instance, resign by saying, “I resign…”, although one can also resign from a position without describing oneself as doing so. However, this intuitive conception is too inclusive, since it also counts whispering as a speech act even though one can whisper a string of nonsense words without meaning anything. Instead a more accurate characterization of speech acts builds on Grice's notion of speaker meaning. This notion is discussed further in Section 6 below, but for now it is enough to note that in looking at my watch, I might be trying to tell the time; or I might be trying to indicate to you that it's time for us to leave. The latter (but not the former) is a case of speaker meaning.

Accordingly, we may now say that speech acts are cases of speaker meaning that can (but need not) be performed by speaker meaning that one is doing so. This conception still counts resigning, promising, asserting and asking as speech acts, while ruling out convincing, insulting and growing six inches. It has the further virtue of ruling out the case of whispering, which one can do without speaker meaning anything and so is no speech act (although of course some speech acts may be performed at the level of a whisper). What is more, speech acts do not essentially involve language: bidding, promising, resigning and challenging are all acts that can be done without words. Our characterization of speech acts captures this fact in emphasizing speaker meaning rather than the uttering of any words.

Speech acts are thus also to be distinguished from performatives. ‘Performative’ is another technical term, and as used here it refers in the first instance to a kind of sentence. A performative sentence is in the first person, present tense, indicative mood, active voice, that describes its speaker as performing a speech act. ‘I assert that George is the culprit,’ is a performative sentence by this test. As we have seen, one can perform a speech act without uttering a performative. Further, since it is merely a type of sentence, one can utter a performative without performing a speech act. For instance, while talking in my sleep I might say, “I hereby promise to climb the Eiffel Tower,” without thereby making any promise. We may also define a performative utterance as an utterance of a performative sentence that is also a speech act. [ 4 ]

More nomenclature: ‘Speech act’ and ‘illocution’ will here be used synonymously. The latter term is due to Austin, who used ‘illocutionary force’ to refer to a dimension of communicative acts. (It is nowadays common also to use ‘illocute’ as a verb meaning ‘to perform a speech act.’) Austin's reason for using ‘force’ begins with the observation that, construed as a bit of observable behavior, the communicative significance of an act may be underdetermined by what has been said or observably done. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, an utterance of a meaningful sentence (which Austin calls a locutionary act ) such as ‘You'll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of those words' meaning but seek to know how that meaning is to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command.

Or so it seems. In an early challenge to Austin, Cohen (1964) argues that the notion of illocutionary force is otiose provided we already have in place the notion of a sentence's meaning (Austin's locutionary meaning). Cohen contends that for a performative sentence, such as ‘I promise to read that novel,’ that sentence's meaning already guarantees that it is a promise. On the other hand, for a sentence that is not a performative, such as ‘I will read that novel,’ if it is understood to be being used to make a promise, the promise is still implicit in the sentence's meaning. In either case, Cohen concludes, meaning already guarantees force and so we do not require an extra-semantic notion to do so.

Cohen's reasoning assumes that any utterance of ‘I promise to read that novel’ is a promise. But as we have seen with the case of the somniloquist, neither a sentence, nor even the utterance of a sentence, is sufficient on its own for the performance of a speech act, be it a promise or some other. In a similar spirit to that of Cohen, Searle (1968, p. 407) observes that a serious and literal utterance of ‘I promise to read that novel,’ made under what he terms “conditions of successful utterance”, also counts as a promise. Searle concludes from this that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, and infers from this in turn that for some sentences, their locutionary meaning determines their illocutionary force. This last inference is, however, a non sequitur . As we have seen, the aforementioned sentence's meaning does not determine the illocutionary force with which it is uttered. Rather, when that sentence is uttered in such a way as to constitute a promise, what determines that force is the meaning of the sentence together with such factors as the speaker's being serious and other contextual conditions being met.

We may thus agree with Searle that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, without losing sight of our earlier observation that locutionary meaning underdetermines illocutionary force. This fact about underdetermination is implied by Davidson's Thesis of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning, according to which once a bit of language has acquired a conventional meaning, it can be used for any of a variety of extra-linguistic purposes (Davidson, 1979). Green 1997 argues that Davidson's Autonomy Thesis is in need of qualification in such a way as to recognize sentences having the feature that if they are used in a speech act all, then there is at least one illocutionary force that their utterance must have. Even in light of this qualified version of the Autonomy Thesis, the most that can be said of, ‘I promise to climb the Eiffel Tower,’ is that it is designed to be used to make promises, just as common nouns are designed to be used to refer to things and predicates are designed to characterize things referred to. Below (Section 6.3) we shall consider the view that force is a component of meaning, albeit not of a sentence's meaning. [ 5 ]

Let us return, then, to an elucidation of our distinction between what a speaker says and the force of her utterance. A grammatical sentence composed of meaningful words is commonly thought to express a “content,” which is determined by what that sentence literally means together with features of the context of utterance. Suppose I say to someone in a crowded subway, “You're standing on my foot.” I am most likely trying to convey the message that he should move. However, what I literally say is only that the addressee in question is standing on my foot. This is the content of my utterance. Many if not most utterances of grammatical sentences composed of meaningful words express more than those sentences' contents. Pragmaticians, however, commonly distinguish content from other aspects of meaning conveyed by an utterance. On this way of thinking, two intertranslatable sentences of different languages will express the same content, and certain transformations of a sentence within a language are commonly thought to express the same content. Thus, ‘Mary saw John,’ and ‘John was seen by Mary,’ will express the same content even if a speaker's use of one rather than another of these will carry a distinctive suggestion. For indicative sentences, such contents are typically called Propositions . (In what follows I will capitalize this term to signify that it is in part technical.) Propositions, then, are the contents of indicative sentences, are what such sentences express, and, further, are often thought to be the primary bearers of truth value. That is, the sentence, ‘It's snowing,’ is true only to the extent that the Proposition, that it is snowing , is true. In what follows we will remain neutral on the proper conceptualization of Propositions. Whether Propositions are sets of possible worlds, ordered n-tuples, or a third kind of entity, will make no difference for our considerations about speech acts.

Illocutionary force and semantic content are often taken to be distinct from one another, not just in the way that your left and right hand are distinct, but rather by virtue of falling into different categories. Stenius 1967 elucidates this distinction, noting that in chemical parlance a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of that compound's properties. Analogously, it is often remarked that a Proposition is itself communicatively inert. For instance, merely expressing the Proposition that it is snowing is not to make a move in a “language game”. Rather, such a move is only made by putting forth a Proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further support from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This common element is the Proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : Propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a Proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of Propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That is why, from the fact that someone has said, “You'll be more punctual in the future,” we cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of communicative acts, pragmatics studies their force.

The force/content distinction also finds parallels in our understanding of mentality. Speech acts are not only moves in a “language game.” They also often purport to express of states of mind with analogous structural properties. An assertion that it is snowing expresses, or purports to express, the speaker's belief that it is snowing. A promise to read Middlemarch expresses, or purports to express, the speaker's intention to read Middlemarch . We find evidence for these relationships in the fact that it is in some sense absurd to say, ‘It's snowing, but I don't believe that it is,’ and ‘I promise to read Middlemarch , but I have no intention of doing so.’ Further, just as we may distinguish between an assert ing and what is assert ed (the so-called “ing/ed ambiguity” for verbs such as ‘assert’), and a promis ing from what is promis ed , we may also distinguish between a state of believing and what is believed, and a state or act of intending and what is intended. Searle 1983 delineates structural analogies between speech acts and the mental states they express. Pendlebury 1986 succinctly explains the merits of this approach.

In spite of these structural analogies, we may still wonder why an elucidation of the notion of force is important for a theory of communication. That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for pragmatics or the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning : Force is a feature not of what is said but of how what is said is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 5 below.

We have spoken thus far as if the contents of speech acts must be Propositions, and indeed Searle routinely analyzes speech acts as having the form F ( p ) (e.g., 1975, p. 344), where ‘ F ’ is the force component and ‘ p ’ the Propositional content component. However, in the last two decades linguistic semantics has developed formal representations of contents for the two other major grammatical moods besides the indicative, namely the interrogative and the imperative. On the strength of the analyses of Hamblin (1958), Bell (1975), Pendlebury (1986) and others, one strategy for the semantics of interrogatives is to construe them as expressing sets of propositions rather than a single proposition, where each element of the putative set is a complete answer to the question at issue. Thus the content expressed by ‘How many doors are shut?’ will be {<No doors are shut>, <One door is shut>, …} where the ellipsis will be filled by as many other Propositions as it is reasonable to interpret the questioner as asking after. Call such a set an Interrogative . A complete answer to an Interrogative is an element of the set by which it is defined; a partial answer is a subset of that set containing two or more members, as in ‘Between two and four doors are shut.’ On the present conceptualization, just as we may distinguish between expressing and asserting a Propositional content, we may also distinguish between expressing an Interrogative and asking a question. One merely expresses an Interrogative in such an utterance as, ‘John wonders how many doors are shut.’ In fact, a single utterance may express two Interrogatives while asking neither, as in ‘How many doors are shut will depend on how many customers are trying on clothes.’ Asking a question is no less substantial a conversational move than is making an assertion.

Similarly, work by Hamblin (1987), Belnap (1990), Portner (2004) and others suggests semantic analyses for sentences in the imperative mood: on one approach an imperative expresses a property, and when one speaker issues an imperative that her addressee accepts, that property is added to her “to do list”, itself a parameter of what we will later describe as conversational score (Section 7).

In light of the above liberalization of the notion of sentential content to accommodate the contents of non-indicative sentences, we may rephrase Stenius's chemical analogy as follows:

Illocutionary force : sentential content :: functional group : radical

with the understanding that different types of sentential content will correspond to the different grammatical moods. This refined analogy would in turn require there to be different types of radical. [ 6 ]

In some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now Treasurer of the Corporation.” Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.) Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, details the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously .

Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses . The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake : I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you do not accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting. As we will see in Section 9, a systematic unwillingness on the part of a speaker's interlocutors to respond with the requisite uptake may compromise that speaker's freedom of speech.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of making good. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for speech acts of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which thousands of types of speech act would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each one. [ 7 ]

As observed by Sbisà 2007, not only can I perform a speech act by speaker meaning that I am doing so, I can also subsequently rescind that act by speaker meaning that I take it back. I cannot, it would seem, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also withdraw it. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am now no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by speaker meaning that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Austin famously claimed that performatives are not statements (1962, p. 6). This may be taken either as the claim that performative sentences, even those in the indicative grammatical mood, lack truth value; or instead as the claim that utterances of performative sentences, even when such sentences have truth value, are not assertions. One can consistently hold that an indicative sentence has truth value, and even that it may be uttered in such a way as to say something true, while denying that its utterance is an assertion. (Testing a microphone in a windowless room, I utter, “It's raining,” and it happens to be raining outside. Here I have said something true but have made no assertion.)

Lemmon 1962 argues that performative utterances are true on the ground that they are instances of a wider class of sentences whose utterance guarantees their truth. If sound, this argument would show that performatives have truth value, but not that they are assertions. It also leaves unanswered the question why some verb phrases such as ‘I promise’ may be used performatively while others cannot be so used. Sinnott-Armstrong 1994 also argues that performatives can have truth value without addressing the question whether they are also used to make assertions. Reimer 1995 argues that while performatives have truth values, they are not also assertions. Adopting a similar strategy, Jary 2007 aims to explain how utterances of such sentences as “I order you to clean the kitchen,” can succeed in being orders. In so doing he draws on Green's 2007 analysis of showing to argue that such utterances show (rather than merely describe) the force of the speaker's utterance. Because ‘show’ is factive, if such an utterance shows its force, then it must have that force.

Most challenges to Austin, however, construe performatives as assertions and attempt to explain their properties in that light. Ginet 1979 argues that performative verbs (‘promise,’ ‘appoint’, etc.) name the kinds of acts that one can perform by asserting that one is doing so, and elaborates on why this is so. In this way he offers an account of how performatives work that depends on the assumption that performative utterances are assertions. Starting from that same assumption, Bach 1975 contends that ‘I order you to clean the kitchen’ is an assertion, and proceeds to explain on this basis how the speaker is indirectly also issuing an order. This explanation depends on the speaker's being able to count on the addressee's ability to discern the speaker's communicative intention. In later work, such as Bach and Harnish 1978, and 1992, this view is refined with a notion of standardization, so that a sufficiently common practice of issuing assertions with performative effect enables speakers and hearers to bypass complex inferential reasoning and jump by default to a conclusion about the illocution being performed. Reimer 1995 challenges Bach and Harnish on the ground that hearers do not seem to impute assertoric force to the indicative sentences speakers utter with performative effect; her criticism would evidently carry over to Ginet's proposal as well. Instead Reimer contends that performative utterances rest on systems of what she terms illocutionary conventions to achieve their performative effects.

Searle 1969 had argued that a performative formula such as “I promise to…” is an “illocutionary force indicator” in the sense that it is a device whose role is to make explicit the force of the speaker's utterance. Making something explicit, however, would seem to involve characterizing an independent event or state of affairs, and as a result Searle's account presupposes that speakers can imbue their utterances with the force of demotions and excommunications; yet this is what was to be explained. Realizing this, in later work Searle and Vanderveken (1985) characterize performatives as speech acts having the force of declarations. Uncontroversial examples of this speech act are declaring war or adjourning a meeting. In later work (1989), however, Searle acknowledged that this account pushes us back to the question how certain expressions come to have the power to make declarations. In that same work he offers an answer to this question that depends on the view that in uttering a sentence with a performative prefix, a speaker manifests an intention to perform an act of a certain kind: in uttering the words, ‘I order you to close the door’, I manifest an intention to order you to close the door, etc. Searle also takes it that manifesting an intention to perform a speech act is sufficient for the performance of that act. On this basis, Searle goes on to attempt to derive the assertoric nature of performatives, holding that when uttered in such a way as to say something true, they are also assertions.

3. Aspects of Illocutionary Force

Austin distinguishes illocutionary acts into five categories: verdictives (in which a speaker gives a verdict, e.g. acquitting and diagnosing), exercitives (in which speakers exercise powers, rights or influence, e.g. excommunicating and resigning), commissives (in which speakers commit themselves to causes or courses of action, e.g. promising and betting), behabitives (concerning attitudes and social behavior, e.g. apologizing and toasting), and expositives (in which speakers clarify how their utterances fit into lines of reasoning, e.g., postulating and defining).

Austin makes clear that he does not find his taxonomy satisfactory, and Searle criticizes Austin's taxonomy on two central grounds. First, Austin's methodology is unduly lexicographic, assuming that we can learn about the range and limits of illocutionary acts by studying illocutionary verbs in English or other languages. However, Searle observes, nothing rules out the possibility of there being illocutionary acts that are not named by a verb either in a particular language such as Swahili or Bengali, or indeed in any language at all; similarly, two non-synonymous illocutionary verbs may yet name one and the same illocutionary act.

Second, Searle argues that the principles of distinction among Austin's categories are unclear. For instance, behavitives seem to be a heterogeneous bunch with little unifying principle. Similarly, ‘describe’ appears both as a verdictive and as an expositive whereas one would expect taxonomic categories to be mutually exclusive. More generally, Austin's brief account of each category gives no direction as to why this way of delineating them does so along their most fundamental features. Searle offers a new categorization of speech acts based on relatively clear principles of distinction. To appreciate this it will help to explain some of the basic concepts he uses for this purpose.

Consider an example derived from Anscombe (1963): a woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to procure; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists are identical, yet they differ along another dimension. For the contents of the husband's list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit : It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective's list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband's cart. As such, the detective's list has word-to-world direction of fit : The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying “Thank you,” and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., “Tell me who is at the door!”), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, “Hooray for Arsenal!” Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having “null” direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all. [ 8 ]

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts are subject to different norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, “How do you know?” (Williamson 1996), while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture (Green 2009). Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit?

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction . This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: It is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction—truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, typically in a speech act, performed by an addressee, such as an assertion that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: An assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, in a way enabling us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Sections 6–7.

In an attempt to systematize and deepen Austin's approach, Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of forces such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

• Illocutionary point : This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are, and perhaps also to bring about belief in an addressee; the characteristic aim of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.
• Degree of strength of the illocutionary point : Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.
• Mode of achievement : This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.
• Content conditions : Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control; or, at least, I cannot promise to do anything that it is obvious to myself and my promissee that I cannot do. So too, I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law. (In light of our discussion above of semantics for non-indicative contents, this condition could be recast in terms of imperatival, interrogative, and propositional content conditions.)
• Preparatory conditions : These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.
• Sincerity conditions : Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.
• Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions : Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken (1985) suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting” of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F 1 and F 2 are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot slow the expansion of the universe or convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the slowing of the universe's expansion. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight even though some flightless creatures are winged.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do so by noting that under the right conditions, one can urge just by saying, “I hereby urge you to shut the door,” while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you just by saying, “I hereby persuade you to shut the door.” A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act (1962, p. 107). Cohen (1973) develops the idea of perlocutions as characteristic aims of speech acts.

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, one speech act can be performed by virtue of the performance of another one. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1979). Phrases that are commonly used in service of indirect speech acts are, ‘Would you mind terribly if I…,’ ‘Might I suggest…,’ and ‘It seems to me that…’

While indirect communication is ubiquitous, indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. Consider an example of a type often used to illustrate indirect speech acts. A asks B , ‘Can you come to dinner with us tonight?’, and B replies, ‘I have to study.’ B makes it clear that she is too busy to join A for dinner. However, must we conclude that she has done this by illocuting, for instance stating that she is too busy to join A for dinner? This seems unlikely. After all, if B did not think that her studying would prevent her from joining A for dinner, she would be misleading in saying what she does, but not a liar; yet if in answering as she has, she is asserting that she is unable to join A for dinner, she would be lying if she took her study plans not to interfere with dinner plans. Analogous arguments can be constructed for other illocutions that B might be thought to be performing. Similarly, in asking whether you intend to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might indeed jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without performing the speech act of suggesting. Saul (2012) provides an extensive study of lying and misleading in the context of implicature and speech act theory.

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. Likewise for the dinner and smoking cases. What is more, these intentions must be feasibly discernible on the part of one's audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I will not have issued a request unless I have made that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by providing evidence justifying an inference to the best explanation. Perhaps the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so, and perhaps the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is that I intend to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope, or expression of hope, that you do so. Bertolet 1994 develops a more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker's intentional state—hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is, he contends, explanatorily unmotivated.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur at all, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature–that process by which we mean more (and on some occasions less) than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle's 1979 influential account of indirect speech acts is couched in terms of conversational implicature (although he does not use this phrase). The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this theme in Section 6. [ 9 ]

4. Mood, Force and Convention

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen, that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you've used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a question, since you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles Meredith is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with contextual clues, intonation and the like to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism . According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of ‘I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,’ to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. J.L. Austin seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of “felicity conditions” for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances… (1962, p. 14).

Austin's student Searle follows him in this, writing

…utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

…the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and …speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Millikan (1998) espouses a parsimonious conception of conventions that she terms ‘natural conventions,’ and on the assumption that natural conventions are a type of convention, one would expect this strategy to make it easier to defend the view that speech acts are inherently conventional. For Millikan, a natural convention is constituted by patterns that are reproduced by virtue of the weight of precedent. [ 10 ] A pattern is reproduced just in case it has a form that derives from a previous entity having, in certain respects, the same form, and in such a way that had the previous form been different in those respects, the current form would be different in those respects as well (1998, p. 163). Photocopying is one form of reproduction meeting these criteria; the retinotopic mapping from patterns of stimulation on the retina to patterns of stimulation in the visual cortex is evidently another. Millikan would not treat retinotopic mapping as a type of convention, however, since it would not seem to be perpetuated by virtue of the weight of precedent. The point is difficult to discern, however, since in her discussion of the matter Millikan discusses the conditions under which a pattern is taken to be conventional, rather than for it to be conventional, writing

To be thought of as conventional, a reproduced pattern must be perceived as proliferated due, in important part, to weight of precedent, not to its intrinsically superior capacity to produce a desired result, or due, say, to ignorance of alternatives (ibid, p. 166).

Millikan thus seems to characterize what it is for a pattern to have weight of precedent in terms of that pattern's being perceived to have such weight. This notion is not itself elucidated, and as a result the notion of weight of precedent is left obscure in her account. Nonetheless, she tells us that just as the conventions of chess dictate that when one's king is in check, one does what one can to get him out of check; so too the conventions of language dictate that when A tells B that p , B responds by believing that p . Millikan describes the hearer's response as a hidden, inner act that is not under B 's voluntary control. Millikan also describes this response as being learned in the way that we learn what she calls “natural sign patterns,” such as our learning that the sound of crashing waves is an indication of a nearby coastline.

On Millikan's view, then, A 's assertion of p being followed by B 's belief that p is a process that is not intrinsically superior to others that might have been followed. This may be doubted, however. What, after, all would be viable alternative responses? Dis believing p ? Remaining neutral on the question of p ? Scratching one's left earlobe? Any of these responses would tend to undermine using language as a means of transmission of information. What is more, if belief formation is not under the voluntary control of addressees, it is obscure how this aspect of communication could be conventional, any more than the pattern of stimulation of our visual cortex is conventional when that pattern results from an isomorphic pattern on the retina.

4.3. An Intentionalist Alternative to Force Conventionalism

Force-conventionalism as espoused by Austin and later Searle has been challenged by Strawson , who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one's arms, and say, “I entreat you.” But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions….[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone's speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another's communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it manifests an intention to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as appointing and excommunicating. So too, as Skinner (1970) observes, understanding the utterances of an historical figure crucially depends on sensitivity to conventions of the society in which they are made.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

As Green 2013 observes, the point may be doubted. Suppose I am trying to work up the courage to ask Sidney's hand in marriage. Sidney recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my fumbling in my pocket for an engagement ring. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in asking Sidney anything. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won't inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. [ 11 ] Closer to Searle's example, even if you were to find, on the basis of fMRI analysis of my neural activity, that I was trying to tell you that it's going to rain tomorrow, I still have not asserted anything about tomorrow's weather. (If I were completely paralyzed as a result of Locked-In Syndrome, then making such a neural effort might be the most I can hope to do; in that case, your fMRI information might be enough to justify you in holding me to have performed a speech act.)

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act—we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, their gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of a publicly accessible commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning—to which I now turn.

5. Speaker-Meaning and Force

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems crucial to how I mean what I say. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of how I mean what I say that I happen to be speaking at that volume. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is an aspect of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, any aspect of what I say—that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be crucial to how I mean what I do.

In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two senses of ‘mean’. One sense is exemplified by remarks such as ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ and ‘Those spots mean measles.’ The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs ‘natural meaning’. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this sense of ‘mean’ from another sense of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying “You make a better door than a window”, George meant that you should move,

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there's quicksand over there,

Grice used the term ‘non-natural meaning’ for this sense of ‘mean’, and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term ‘speaker meaning’. [ 12 ] After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall heretofore call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might leave Smith's handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone's beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John's severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod's action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered communicators who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention .

It has, however, been argued that intentions to produce cognitive or other effects on an audience are not necessary for speaker meaning. Davis 1992 offers many cases of speaker meaning in the absence of reflexive communicative intentions. Indeed, he forcefully argues that speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience. [ 13 ] , [ 14 ] Instead of intentions to produce certain effects in an audience, some authors have proposed that speaker meaning is a matter of overtly indicating some aspect of one's state of mind. (Green, 2007). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it is more plausible that I mean that it is raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this detour through speaker meaning help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P , it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P , and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, “How do you know that?” I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same “liability to error” way, but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P ; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content—where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one's intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

• conjecturing

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move down the list we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, “How do you know that?”, and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The “educated guess” is intermediate between these two cases.)

We may think of this illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning as characterizing not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, “You're tired,” and my remark, “I'm tired,” as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P , followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P , as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed further in Section 8 under the rubric of “mode” of illocutionary commitment. [ 15 ]

Speaker meaning, then, encompasses not just content but also force, and we may elucidate this in light of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so—a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle's view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one's intention to perform that act. What is missing from Searle's characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one's heart (or mind) on one's sleeve.

6. Force, Norms, and Conversation

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have sought to characterize speech acts in terms of their conversational roles. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that–not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, a speech act's “ecological niche” may nevertheless be the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove a speech act type from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may blind us to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic , suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word's meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of so-called conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. [ 16 ] For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers to those questions. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. Green 1999 rejoins that many conversations may indeed be construed in teleological terms. For instance, many conversations may be construed as aimed at answering a question, even when that question concerns something as banal as the afternoon's weather or the location of the nearest subway station. Asher and Lascardes (2003) develop a systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that also responds to Searle's challenge. Additionally, Roberts (2004, 2012) develops a model of conversational kinematics according to which conversations are invariably aimed at answering what she terms a question under discussion (QUD). This view is best appreciated within the framework of the “scorekeeping model” of conversation, to which we now turn.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from research in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974), Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the kinematics of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of Propositions that can be presupposed by interlocutors. This set of Propositions is the conversational common ground , defined as that set of Propositions that all interlocutors take to be true, while also taking it that all other interlocutors take them to be true. If a Proposition p is in a conversation's common ground, then a speaker may felicitously presuppose p's truth. Suppose then that the Proposition that Singapore has a unique King is in a conversation's common ground at given point; then a speaker may felicitously utter a sentence such as ‘The present King of Singapore is wise,’ or ‘Singapore's king is sleeping’. Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, and addressee. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as “conversational score”.

“Scorekeeping” approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a Proposition: If that “assertion” is accepted, then the score is updated by having the Proposition entered into common ground. In this spirit, MacFarlane (2011) considers an account of the speech act of assertion in terms an utterance's capacity to update conversational score. Such an approach will, however, face a difficulty in explaining how two speech acts with the same content, such as an assertion that the Milky Way contains a black hole, and a conjecture that it does, will make different conversational contributions. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would include sensitivity to differences such as these.

Another development in the scorekeeping model refines the teleological picture adumbrated above to incorporate Questions, construed (along the lines of Section 2.1) as sets of Propositions. When an interlocutor proffers an assertion that is not met with objections by others in the conversation, the Propositional content of that illocution will enter into common ground. When an interlocutor poses a question that is accepted by others, we may represent the change as an addition to Common Ground of the set of propositions that is the Interrogative content of that illocution. The presence of that Interrogative obliges interlocutors to work to rule all but one Proposition that is a complete answer to the Interrogative. Because Interrogatives stand in inferential relations to one another (Q1 entails Q2 just in case any answer to Q1 is an answer to Q2), one strategy for answering a question is to divide it into tractable questions that it entails: ‘How many covered bridges are there in Japan?’ can be answered by answering that question for each of that country's 47 prefectures. Roberts (2004, 2012) develops the Question Under Discussion model of conversational dynamics according to which common ground contains a partially ordered set of Interrogatives in addition to a set of Propositions. This teleological approach to conversation bids fair to enrich our understanding of the relations of speech acts to other central topics within pragmatics such as presupposition and implicature. [ 17 ]

Frege's Begriffschrift constitutes history's first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system in which to carry out deductive reasoning. However, Frege did not see his Begriffschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from proposition already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator : an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth. (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege's idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson (1979), however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise of introducing force-indicating devices into languages, formal or otherwise. Davidson's reason is that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one's speech act, the only interest a force indicator could have would be if it could guarantee the force of one's speech act. But nothing could do this: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of her performance. Referring to the putative force-indicating device as a ‘strengthened mood,’ he writes,

It is apparent that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion: every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Dummett 1993 and Hare 1989 reply to Davidson. Hare in particular remarks that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act, even those utterances that occur on stage or as used by jokers or storytellers. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to the issue of illocutionary acts, which, as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P , so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one's performing a speech act: Such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, it would show which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, ‘as is the case’ can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: ‘If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Greenland will melt.’ Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is also committed to the content of the antecedent. If this claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Subsequent to Austin's introduction of the notion of a performative, it has also been suggested that what we might call performative sentential frames behave like force indicators: ‘I claim that it is sunny,’ seems to be a prolix way of saying that it is sunny, where the ‘I claim’ seems only to indicate how what follows is to be taken. On the approach of Urmson (1952), for instance, such a sentence should be understood on the model of ‘It is sunny, I claim.’ Support for such an analysis may be found in the fact that a potential reply to Marisa's utterance is ‘No it isn't; it's pouring outside!’, while ‘No you don't’ is not. Again, if Marisa does not believe that it is sunny outside, she cannot dodge the accusation of lying by remarking that what she had asserted was that she claimed that it is sunny, and not anything about the weather.

Nonetheless, drawing on Cohen 1964, Lycan 2008 objects to the view that such performative frames make no contribution to sentence or utterance meaning. If Marissa felicitously utters, ‘I claim that it is sunny,’ while Abdul felicitously utters, ‘I conjecture that it is sunny,’ the view implies that their utterances mean the same. The two speakers have clearly said different things, however. On the other hand, if we hold that the performative frame does contribute to the content of what Marissa and Abdul said, then, Lycan points out, it will be difficult to explain how their utterances commit either of them to any position about the weather. It certainly won't do to posit inference rules such as ‘I state that p ,‘ ergo , ‘ p ’. We will consider a solution to what Lycan terms “Cohen's Problem” after developing a notion of illocutionary inference in the next section.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the Illocution rather than the Proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among Propositions. Since particulars cannot stand in inferential relations to one another, no such relations could obtain between individual speech acts. However, just as two event-types E 1 and E 2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S 1 and S 2 could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment . According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S 1 commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S 2 iff it is not possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 . Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S 1 is identical with <IP 1 , Str 1 , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 > (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S 2 is identical with <IP 1 , Str 2 , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 >. Suppose further that Str 1 and Str 2 differ only in that 1 is stronger than 2. Then it will not be possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 ; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n −1 implies a speech act S n .)

Searle and Vanderveken also define a notion of weak illocutionary commitment such that S 1 weakly illocutionarily implies S 2 iff every performance of S 1 commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S 2 (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q , and an agent asserts P , then she is committed to believing that Q . These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q . In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q ) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q .

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R , then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R . That is not to say that I have also asserted R : if assertion were closed under deductive consequence I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q , then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q . For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q . Developing this theme, let S be an arbitrary speaker, <Δ l A l , …, Δ n A n , Δ B > a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

<Δ l A l , …, Δ n A n , Δ B > is illocutionarily valid iff if speaker S is committed to each A i under mode Δ i , then S is committed to B under mode Δ. [ 18 ]

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken's definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S 1 , …, S n −1 , which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act S n . Even in such a case she performs S n only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n −1 ; it is difficult to see how one can perform S n while having no intention of performing a speech act at all. Our finding thus provides little succor for Hare's reply to Davidson as discussed in Section 7 above.

We are also in a position to make headway on Cohen's Problem as formulated by Lycan. As argued in Green 2000, in an assertion of ‘I (hereby) assert that p ’, a speaker commits herself to p even though her words do not logically entail that Proposition; nor do they presuppose, or either conversationally or conventionally imply it. They do, however, illocutionarily entail it: anyone committed to ‘I assert that p ’ assertorically is thereby committed to p assertorically. By contrast, one committed to ‘I assert that p ’ as a supposition for the sake of argument is not thereby committed to p . Accordingly, such a phrase as ‘I assert that’ is semantically opaque (making a non-trivial contribution to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it occurs) but pragmatically transparent in the sense that a speaker who undertakes assertoric commitment to a sentence in which it has widest scope is also assertorically committed to its complement. Analogous remarks apply to ‘I conjecture that’ and the like.

We have also made progress on a question raised in Section 1, namely whether “speech act theory” deserves its name. An appropriate definition of illocutions would enable us to explain, rather than merely describe, some features of speech acts. Vanderveken 1990 offers a set of tableaux depicting inferential relations among speech acts. For instance, the following is a fragment of his tableaux for assertives—speech acts whose illocutionary point is to describe how things are:

castigate reprimand accuse blame criticize assert suggest

where strong illocutionary validity moves from left to right. This is because all these speech acts have the illocutionary point of describing how things are, but the propositional content conditions and degree of strength of illocutionary point conditions become increasingly less stringent as we move from left to right. Accounts of this sort offer hope of our being able informatively to answer such questions whether someone who castigates an addressee for some state of affairs is also assertorically committed to the obtaining of that state of affairs. Might we discover “illocutionary tautologies”, “illocutionary absurdities” and other phenomena that could shed light on such utterances as “This very utterance is an assertion”, “I doubt this very claim”? Affirmative answers to such questions will provide a welcome further justification of our use of “speech act theory”.

In a paradigmatic illocutionary event, a speaker has a choice of which if any speech act to perform and her addressee will do her charitable best to discern that speaker's intentions and, where necessary, which conventions she may be invoking. Pratt (1986) observes that this paradigm is not true to the facts of very many areas of communicative life, writing

An account of linguistic interaction based on the idea of exchange glosses over the very basic facts that, to put it crudely, some people get to do more talking than others, some are supposed to do more listening, and not everybody's words are worth the same. (1986, p. 68)

Although Pratt intends this remark as a critique of speech act theory, it also suggests a way in which this theory might shed light on subtle forms of oppression. We saw in Section 2.2 that a putative bet can misfire if it is not accepted. In such a case the speaker attempts to bet but fails in that effort due to a lack of audience uptake. So too, a person may not be in the correct social position to, say, excommunicate or appoint. As a result, her attempts to perform such illocutions will misfire. More momentously, a pattern of abuses of speech act institutions might deprive a person of an ability to perform speech acts: the inveterate welsher will, in time, lead others in his community to be unwilling to accept any promises he tries to make. He can perform countless locutionary acts but will be unable to perform the illocutionary act of promising, at least in this community. His utterances may be locutionarily normal but will be illocutionarily inert.

A pattern of culpable behavior could make a speaker inert with respect to one speech act type. Could a pattern of culpable behavior–intentional or inadvertent—on the part of others in a speaker's community also maker her inert with respect to a type of speech act? This could happen if enough such speakers decide never to accept one person's bets, or her warnings or promises. Beyond such hypothetical cases, it has been argued that patterns of social inequality can manifest themselves as disabling certain groups from the ability to perform speech acts. Building on and refining McKinnon's (1993) claim that pornography silences women, Langton (1993), and Hornsby and Langton (1998) argue that the industry and consumption of pornography deprive women of the ability to perform the speech act of refusing sexual advances. Refusing is a speech act, but if large enough numbers of men deny uptake (with such thoughts as, “By ‘no’ she really means ‘yes’,” etc.) then, these authors argue, women's attempts to refuse sexual advances will be characteristically inert with respect to the speech act of refusal. Women will still be able to attempt to refuse sexual advances, and can still try to prevent them by physical means, but a crucial illocutionary form of protection will be closed to them. So too, apartheid, Jim Crow, and even patterns of discrimination of which the perpetrators are not consciously aware, can deprive racial, religious, and ethnic minority groups of the ability to perform speech-act types requiring uptake. These phenomena are generally referred to as illocutionary silencing .

Bird (2002), however, denies that the speech act of refusal requires uptake. Such an illocution is, he contends, like inviting and surrendering, which can occur whether or not their intended audiences grasp or accept the proffered illocutions. Similarly denying that the “silencing” argument should be cast in terms of speech acts, Maitra 2009 argues that the institution of pornography prevents speaker-meant instances of refusal from being understood. One can speaker-mean that she refuses, for instance, but patterns of cognitive and affective response will systematically prevent that refusal from being grasped. Broadening the scope of investigations of the interaction of injustice and illocutionary phenomena, McGowan 2009 argues that some speech acts can not only cause but also constitute instances of oppression. Anderson, Haslanger and Langton (2012) and McConnell-Ginet (2012) provide overviews of research on racial, gender and related forms of oppression as they relate to speech acts. Recent scholarship offers hope that speech act theory will illuminate power structures indiscernible through the lenses of syntax and semantics alone.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Research project in the philosophy of language , maintained at the University of Berne, Switzerland. This site is devoted to some main themes of research stemming from Grices' work on speaker meaning and implicature.
• Working Papers in Lingustics , University College London.
• Question Under Discussion , collecting research germane to this approach to conversational kinematics. .
• ‘ Toward a history of speech act theory ,’ a paper by Barry Smith (SUNY/Buffalo).
• ‘ J.L. Austin ,’ an annotated bibliography by Guy Longworth, Oxford Bibliographies Online .
• ‘ Pragmatics ,’ an annotated bibliography by Mitchell S. Green, Oxford Bibliographies Online .

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Illocutionary Act

Making an Explicit Point

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• 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
• Locutionary Act Definition in Speech-Act Theory
• Speech Act Theory
• Perlocutionary Act Speech
• Illocutionary Force in Speech Theory
• Phonetic Prosody
• Felicity Conditions: Definition and Examples
• Appropriateness in Communication
• Performative Verbs
• Explicature (Speech Acts)
• Verbal Hedge: Definition and Examples
• Information Content (Language)
• The Power of Indirectness in Speaking and Writing
• Definition and Examples of Sarcasm
• Coherence in Composition
• Definition and Examples of Linguistic Accommodation

Oral Communication in Context Quarter 1 – Module 7: Types of Speech Act

This module Types of Speech Act was designed to make you better understand the following:

A. Types of Speech Act;

B. Locution (Utterance);

C. Illocution (Intention); and

D. Perlocution (Response).

As you go through this module, you will have a deeper understanding of the nature and elements of oral communication in context, and design and perform effective controlled and uncontrolled oral communication activities based on context.

After going through this module, you are expected to:

1. define speech acts;

2. distinguish types of speech act; and

3. recognize that communicative competence requires understanding of speech acts.

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