speech act analysis thesis

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Introduction: Assertion among the Speech Acts

Published: November 2018
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Consider the sorts of act one performs when one makes a statement or report, gives one’s testimony, or tells another person something. There are various ways we might try to characterize the nature of acts like these. They (typically) involve the utterance of a declarative sentence in an ordinary conversational context; they are acts in which the speaker makes as if to express a belief of hers, or in which she commits herself to the truth of the relevant propositional content, or in which she (characteristically) aims to induce a belief with that content in her audience. However we characterize acts of these sorts, to have this class of speech act in mind is a good initial way to approach what philosophers and linguists have in mind when they speak of assertions . Work in this area typically proceeds on the assumptions, first, that there is an interesting and unified type of speech act here, and second, that acts of this type have features that are of some theoretical interest—not only in linguistics and in philosophy of language, but also in psychology, law, sociology, political science, education theory, computer science, and elsewhere.

It turns out to be a difficult matter to fix the contours of the class of acts precisely. Indeed, one might even doubt that this can be done in a theory-neutral way. 1 Even so, many philosophers and linguists have thought that this sort of taxonomic project is worth pursuing. The simplest explanation for this project is this: a speech act with something like the profile described earlier appears to be related to various other phenomena of theoretical interest, and we might hope to appeal to our understanding of the act itself to shed light on these other phenomena. If we give the label “assertion” to the (alleged) type of speech act in question, we might pursue the hypothesis that assertion is a type of speech act that

is apt for the expression of judgment and belief; 2

is apt for the transmission of knowledge; 3

commits one to the truth of a proposition; 4

makes possible lies and acts of incompetence, and so renders one prone to a distinctive type of ethical assessment bound up with issues of trust and trustworthiness. 5

And we might appeal to the nature of this act in an attempt to spell out such things as

how language can be used to represent a worldly state of affairs; 6

what it is for an expression to have a meaning, or to have the distinct meaning that it has; 7

what is involved in being trustworthy; 8

how we should think about communication itself; 9

how language use is bound up with many of the ways in which we hold one another accountable; 10

how bias and relations of oppression might distort this sort of accountability. 11

The prospect of a route to illuminating these and other matters is part of what leads many philosophers to attend to the nature of assertion itself.

It is no wonder, then, that as a speech act, assertion has loomed large in the philosophical imagination. Arguably, the category of assertion itself, as a distinctive way in which one presents a proposition as true, was not clearly framed until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. 12 Even so, topics in the vicinity have been on the philosophical agenda for centuries. Ancient and medieval logicians were very interested in the act of judgement itself, thereby manifesting an interest in what many contemporaries regard as the mental analogue of assertion. So, too, in early modern Europe the English philosopher Thomas Reid was very interested in the use of speech to express belief and spread knowledge. In the more recent history of philosophy, in the late nineteenth century the German philosopher Gottlob Frege felt the need to represent (something like) the act of assertion in his attempted formalization of logic ( Begriffschrift ). In the early twentieth century the English philosopher G. E. Moore saw in the nature of assertion one way to diagnose the paradoxicality of sentences such as “It’s raining but I don’t believe that it is raining”—sentences whose sincere use appears to be self-undermining, even as the state of affairs they describe is a possible one. More recently still, the mid-century English philosopher J. L. Austin, taking a stand against the long tradition in philosophy that focused most of its attention on the statement (a category of speech act arguably coextensive with assertion), railed against the central role philosophers ascribed to this act. A bit later, the English philosopher Paul Grice argued that so-called nonnatural meaning —the sort of meaning involved in acts of communication—could be understood in terms of an act very much like, if not the same as, the act of assertion. (Grice somewhat misleadingly called this act the act of saying .)

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that assertion has received the attention it has. Somewhat more surprising is the extent to which there has been a resurgence of interest among philosophers for this type of act. According to Google Scholar, in the one hundred years between 1895 and 1995, there were just under seventy-five published papers that use or mention “the nature of assertion,” whereas in the approximately twenty-five years since then there have been over four hundred. No doubt some of this discrepancy is owed to a greater number of publishing venues in the last several decades as well as the professionalization of philosophy itself (putting pressure on people to publish). But part of it is owed to a renewed interest in the act itself.

This handbook aims to explore various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. While it does not aim at exhaustiveness, the handbook presents some of the best work done on the core issues pertaining to assertion. These issues should be of interest not only to philosophers but also linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies. Although it is broken up into parts, all of the papers can be read in isolation by those interested only in a single topic. The entries themselves, written by leading theorists, offer opinionated introductions to the topics.

Part 1 explores the nature of assertion. What distinguishes assertion as a speech act? A traditional way to approach this question is in terms of the familiar distinction between (illocutionary) force and content. While this distinction is not entirely uncontroversial, 13 it provides the standard way to address the distinctiveness of speech act types, namely, by treating each distinct type as individuated by the distinctive force of acts of that type. On this approach, assertions are those speech acts with a distinctive (assertoric) force, and our question becomes: under what conditions does an utterance have a force of that kind? But however we frame the question, our topic is the individuation of assertion as a speech act. The seven papers in Part 1 explore the seven leading accounts. A rather loose but informative taxonomy of these accounts is in terms of four main ways one might try to capture the nature of the act itself. (Where accounts might be placed under more than one category, I place it under the category that is most characteristic of the account.)

The first category includes those accounts that characterize assertion in terms of the contextual effects of performing speech acts of this type. This handbook has chapters devoted to two distinct varieties of this sort of account. Lenny Clapp presents an account, owed to Robert Stalnaker and often developed as part of “discourse dynamics,” according to which the “essential effect” of an assertion is to update the context of conversation by adding the proposition asserted to the set of propositions that have been mutually presupposed in the conversation. An alternative account within this same general category, deriving from the work of Robert Brandom and presented in the chapter by Lionel Shapiro, holds that to assert a proposition is to perform a speech act in which the speaker undertakes a commitment to defend that proposition (if called upon to do so) and authorizes others to believe the proposition in question.

A second category includes those accounts that see the nature of the act as closely linked with the declarative (grammatical) mood. Once again, this handbook has chapters devoted to two distinct varieties of this sort of account. In his chapter, Mark Jary defends a view on which to assert a proposition is to undertake a commitment to defend the proposition by way of uttering a sentence in the declarative mood. Peter Pagin develops a view on which assertion is the type of speech act that is prima facie informative, where prima facie informativeness is linked in an indirect way with the declarative mood.

A third category includes those accounts that construe assertions in terms of the rule (or norm) that governs acts of this type. This type of account, which is described in the chapter by Mona Simion and Chris Kelp, might be seen as deriving from the work of John Searle. In any case it has become significantly more popular, owing to a recent defense of a version of this sort of account by Tim Williamson, according to which assertion is the unique speech act governed by a knowledge norm, to the effect that one must assert only what one knows.

A fourth category includes those broadly Gricean accounts that approach the nature of assertion in terms of the communicative intentions that inform acts of that type. If we think of communicative intentions as the sort of intentions to achieve an effect on an audience by way of the audience’s recognition of this intention, then the Gricean approach to assertion holds that assertions are those acts performed with the communicative intention to get the audience to believe that the speaker believes the proposition in question. This sort of view is developed in the chapter by Mark Siebel.

The last of the chapters in this first part, by Herman Cappelen, does not fall into any of these categories, as it challenges the theoretical utility of the speech act category assertion itself. On Cappelen’s view, this category is “defective” and does not pick out any interesting kind of speech act.

Part 2 collects three essays which, broadly speaking, address the place of assertion within speech act theory more generally. In her contribution, Marina Sbisà addresses whether the speech act is to be granted any special place within speech act theory, and she considers how this question might be answered from the perspective of various types of account of the speech acts themselves (Austinian, Gricean, normative-pragmatic, Alstonian). Mark van Roojen asks about the role assertion might play in an account of promising, with special attention to the commitment one incurs in the act of promising. And in her contribution Hallie Liberto argues that contrary to the view deriving from John Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts, threats and warnings are themselves illocutionary acts, and she uses assertion in her analysis of those acts.

Part 3 addresses variations within the category of assertion itself. Several such variations are explored in the papers in this part. One variation involves assertions that in some sense or other are qualified, as in the contribution by Matthew Benton and Peter van Elswyk focusing on what they call “hedged assertion.” In addition, it includes assertions that are made in nonstandard ways. This topic is explored in Marga Reimer’s contribution, where she focuses on the category of indirect assertion—for example, the sort of speech act that is made when one asks a rhetorical question. It includes as well assertions that are “marked” in some way. Thus, in his contribution, Ben Kotzee is keen to see how bullshit (in Harry Frankfurt’s sense) might be seen as a distinctive type of perversion of the speech act of assertion, using this analysis in turn to shed light on the nature of assertion itself. And Christopher Hom explores those assertions that constitute slurring speech, offering an account on which a slur and its neutral counterpart differ in their Fregean senses. Finally, it includes an exploration of cases involving what we might call nonstandard agents of the act of assertion itself. Thus, Kirk Ludwig is interested in cases in which assertions are made by proxy, and Deborah Tollefsen explores what is involved when a group (rather than an individual) is said to make an assertion.

The four papers of Part 4 address what we might call methodological issues in the study of assertion. Mitch Green’s contribution addresses the issue of the conventionality of assertion, arguing that the act of assertion does not require the existence of a conventional means of expression (even as making an assertion is something that can be aided by such conventions). In his paper, Martin Montminy argues that there is no theory-neutral way to identify assertions, and he uses the freedom that this indeterminacy provides to defend a belief-based account of assertion. Sid Horton’s contribution explores the roles that mindreading plays in the production and comprehension of assertions, suggesting that these will be significant if speech acts are intended to obey the maxim of relevance. In their contribution, Boaz Miller and Ori Freiman ask whether devices or machines can be said to make assertions, and they conclude with a qualified affirmative answer (describing the outputs of devices as “quasi-assertions”).

Part 5 takes up issues pertaining to the content of assertions. Manuel García-Carpintero argues that there can be genuine assertions about matters of fiction and that fiction itself can be seen as making assertions, and that both of these claims are compatible with the fictional status of the content of such assertions. In her contribution, Isidora Stojanovic explores how various theses in the philosophy of mind (concerning the distinctively first-person nature of de se attitudes) might relate to the assertions in which such attitudes are expressed. Corine Besson and Anandi Hattiangati discuss whether the conception of the future as open causes difficulty for the thesis that some assertions about future contingents are true, arguing that those who see these claims as incompatible face some unmet challenges. Fabrizio Cariani explores how the contents of assertions of epistemic modals might be rendered within a Stalnakerian framework. Tim McCarthy discusses the role of assertibility in the generation of various paradoxes.

In recent years, the speech act of assertion has been connected to a host of topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, and Part 6 explores these topics. Ted Hinchman’s contribution explores the relationship between assertion and testimony, arguing that the latter category is the more explanatorily fundamental one, and that this highlights the important interpersonal dimension of assertion itself. Patrick Rysiew focuses on assertions involving ascriptions of knowledge, exploring the role such assertions play as evidence for theories of knowledge, the social roles they play, and the pragmatics and psychology of such ascriptions. In his paper, Rik Peels addresses the extent to which one’s own ignorance is assertable, arguing that of the many types of ignorance, only two can be properly ascribed to oneself in an assertion. Jennifer Lackey criticizes familiar approaches to the standard for proper assertion by developing her notion of the (epistemic) quality of assertion, something she distinguishes from more familiar “quantitative” epistemic properties such as reliability or likelihood on one’s evidence. Robert Fiengo develops Austin’s view of assertion, exploring how our common assertive practices are linked to the knowledge that informs speech acts of this type. Erik Olsson’s paper develops various formal models of an assertion—Bayesian models, game-theoretic models, social network models, logical models, public announcement models—in an attempt to explore the variety of ways in which the speech act can be of interest to epistemologists. Mikkel Gerken and Esben Petersen survey the work on epistemic norms of action, practical deliberation, and assertion, in an attempt to characterize how these norms are interrelated. And Clayton Littlejohn’s paper discusses the role of assertion in Moore’s Paradox, and he explores the prospects for appealing to an account of assertion in order to illuminate the paradoxicality of the phenomenon itself (whether in speech or in thought).

Recent years have also seen a dramatic increase in recognition of and interest in the more social dimensions of assertion; the six papers in Part 7 explore some of these. Peter Graham’s paper borrows Ruth Millikan’s notion of a proper function, arguing that assertion has the proper function of inducing true hearer belief, and that this is so in part because of our social norms for truth-telling. Alessandra Tanesini discusses how individuals from disadvantaged or oppressed groups can be “silenced” when they attempt to make assertions, and she explores the recent literature on these and related topics. In her contribution, Casey Johnson examines how one’s social identity makes a difference to one’s ability to use assertions, indicating in this way how recent work on the speech act is connected to work on such things as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Terence Cuneo argues that ethics is of central importance to the very existence of the illocutionary act of assertion, claiming that it is the possibility of lying that explains the possibility of performing the act of assertion. Jessica Brown addresses a recent defense of the knowledge norm of assertion, according to which norm conformity and blamelessness come apart, and finds this response wanting. And Jessica Pepp defends the traditional thought that there is an ethically significant difference between lying and deliberately misleading (through implication).

Beyond aiming to capture the state of the art on the topic at issue, one of the hopes often associated with a handbook of this sort is to indicate potentially fruitful future lines of research. I want to close this introduction with a brief plea for one such line.

Whether in speech act theory or in philosophy of language and epistemology more generally, theorizing about the act of assertion has tended to focus on face-to-face speech exchanges. To be sure, those with an interest in knowledge transmission have broadened the scope of their interests to include written language as well. But it seems that neither paradigm is entirely happy when we explore the nature of the communicative language-involving acts performed online. This point itself has been made by others. I can only encourage continued reflection on those sorts of acts. In this regard the various accounts of assertion contained herein may prove helpful—if only to make clear a range of questions we might ask as we characterize our online exchanges, and to enable us to understand the full contrast of these exchanges with ordinary face-to-face conversations.

See the contributions in this handbook by Cappelen (chapter 7 ), Sbisà (chapter 8 ), and Montminy (chapter 18 ).

See Siebel (chapter 5 ) and Horton (chapter 19 ), this volume.

See Simion and Kelp (chapter 3 ), Hinchman (chapter 26 ), Rysiew (chapter 27 ), Lackey (chapter 29 ), and Fiengo (chapter 30 ), this volume.

See Shapiro (chapter 4 ) and McCarthy (chapter 25 ), this volume.

See Hinchman (chapter 26 ), Liberto (chapter 10 ), Cuneo (chapter 37 ), and Pepp (chapter 39 ), this volume.

See Pagin (chapter 6), this volume.

See García-Carpintero (chapter 21), Stojanovic (chapter 22), Besson and Hattiangati (chapter 23), and Cariani (chapter 24), this volume.

See Hinchman (chapter 26) and Pepp (chapter 39), this volume.

See Graham (chapter 34) and Olsson (chapter 31), this volume.

See Shapiro (chapter 4), Gerken and Pedersen (chapter 32), Cuneo (chapter 37), and Brown (chapter 38), this volume.

See Hom (chapter 14), Tanesini (chapter 35), and Johnson (chapter 36), this volume.

I thank Rob Stainton for suggesting this (private communication).

Some recent work in speech act theory has called this distinction into question. For discussion, see, e.g., New Work on Speech Acts , eds. Fogal, Harris, and Moss (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Speech acts and arguments

Published: November 1989
Volume 3 , pages 345–365, ( 1989 )

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Scott Jacobs 1

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Speech act theory seems to provide a promising avenue for the analysis of the functional organization of argument. The theory, however, might be taken to suggest that arguments are a homogenous class of speech act with a specifiable illocutionary force and a single set of felicity conditions. This suggestion confuses the analysis of the meaning of speech act verbs with the analysis of the pragmatic structure of actual language use. Suggesting that arguments are conveyed through a homogeneous class of linguistic action overlooks the way in which the context of activity and the form of expression organize the argumentative functions performed in using language. An alternative speech act analysis would treat folk terminology as a heuristic entry point into the development of a technical analysis of the myriad argumentative functions and structures to be found in natural language use. This would lead to a thorough-going pragmatic analysis of the rational and functional design of speech acts in argumentation.

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Speech Act Theory

FranksValli/Wikimedia Commons

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

Speech act theory is a subfield of pragmatics that studies how words are used not only to present information but also to carry out actions.

The speech act theory was introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin in How to Do Things With Words and further developed by American philosopher J.R. Searle. It considers the degree to which utterances are said to perform locutionary acts , illocutionary acts , and/or perlocutionary acts .

Many philosophers and linguists study speech act theory as a way to better understand human communication. "Part of the joy of doing speech act theory, from my strictly first-person point of view, is becoming more and more remindful of how many surprisingly different things we do when we talk to each other," (Kemmerling 2002).

Searle's Five Illocutionary Points

Philosopher J.R. Searle is responsible for devising a system of speech act categorization.

"In the past three decades, speech act theory has become an important branch of the contemporary theory of language thanks mainly to the influence of [J.R.] Searle (1969, 1979) and [H.P.] Grice (1975) whose ideas on meaning and communication have stimulated research in philosophy and in human and cognitive sciences...

From Searle's view, there are only five illocutionary points that speakers can achieve on propositions in an utterance, namely: the assertive, commissive, directive, declaratory and expressive illocutionary points. Speakers achieve the assertive point when they represent how things are in the world, the commissive point when they commit themselves to doing something, the directive point when they make an attempt to get hearers to do something, the declaratory point when they do things in the world at the moment of the utterance solely by virtue of saying that they do and the expressive point when they express their attitudes about objects and facts of the world (Vanderkeven and Kubo 2002).

Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism

"Since 1970 speech act theory has influenced...the practice of literary criticism. When applied to the analysis of direct discourse by a character within a literary work, it provides a systematic...framework for identifying the unspoken presuppositions, implications, and effects of speech acts [that] competent readers and critics have always taken into account, subtly though unsystematically.

Speech act theory has also been used in a more radical way, however, as a model on which to recast the theory of literature...and especially...prose narratives. What the author of a fictional work—or else what the author's invented narrator—narrates is held to constitute a 'pretended' set of assertions, which are intended by the author, and understood by the competent reader, to be free from a speaker's ordinary commitment to the truth of what he or she asserts.

Within the frame of the fictional world that the narrative thus sets up, however, the utterances of the fictional characters—whether these are assertions or promises or marital vows—are held to be responsible to ordinary illocutionary commitments," (Abrams and Galt Harpham 2005).

Criticisms of Speech Act Theory

Although Searle's theory of speech acts has had a tremendous influence on functional aspects of pragmatics, it has also received very strong criticism.

The Function of Sentences

Some argue that Austin and Searle based their work principally on their intuitions, focusing exclusively on sentences isolated from the context where they might be used. In this sense, one of the main contradictions to Searle's suggested typology is the fact that the illocutionary force of a concrete speech act cannot take the form of a sentence as Searle considered it.

"Rather, researchers suggest that a sentence is a grammatical unit within the formal system of language, whereas the speech act involves a communicative function separate from this."

Interactional Aspects of Conversation

"In speech act theory, the hearer is seen as playing a passive role. The illocutionary force of a particular utterance is determined with regard to the linguistic form of the utterance and also introspection as to whether the necessary felicity conditions —not least in relation to the speaker's beliefs and feelings—are fulfilled. Interactional aspects are, thus, neglected.

However, [a] conversation is not just a mere chain of independent illocutionary forces—rather, speech acts are related to other speech acts with a wider discourse context. Speech act theory, in that it does not consider the function played by utterances in driving conversation is, therefore, insufficient in accounting for what actually happens in conversation," (Barron 2003).

Abrams, Meyer Howard, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms . 8th ed., Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2005.
Austin, J.l. “How To Do Things With Words.” 1975.
Barron, Anne. Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics Learning How to Do Things with Words in a Study Abroad Context . J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 2003..
Kemmerling, Andreas. “Speech Acts, Minds, and Social Reality: Discussions with John r. Searle. Expressing an Intentional State.” Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy , vol. 79, 2002, pp. 83. Kluwer Academic Publishers .
Vanderveken, Daniel, and Susumu Kubo. “Introduction.” Essays in Speech Act Theory , John Benjamins, 2001, pp. 1–21.
Speech Acts in Linguistics
Locutionary Act Definition in Speech-Act Theory
Illocutionary Force in Speech Theory
Illocutionary Act
Performative Verbs
Perlocutionary Act Speech
Felicity Conditions: Definition and Examples
The Power of Indirectness in Speaking and Writing
Meaning Semantics
Explicature (Speech Acts)
What Is Relevance Theory in Terms of Communication?
Reported Speech
Information Content (Language)
Examples of Indexicality (Language)
Mental-State Verbs
Pragmatics Gives Context to Language

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30 Speech Act and Discourse Analysis

Ms. Anshikha Adhikari

Introduction

Learning to communicate in a language involves more than acquiring the pronunciation and grammar. We need to learn how to ask question, make suggestion, greet and thank other speakers. In other words we need to learn the uses to which utterances are conventionally put in the new language community and how these uses are signaled. The terminology of such function of language is called speech acts (J.L. Austin, 1975).

Language is the most intrinsic and a complex semiotic system that human beings have developed to satiate their social need for communication. This eventually helps them to maintain the social and cultural relations. We all know that linguistic communication can not be achieved by individual sounds, words or sentences. These linguistic units are put together which are contextually defined.

Now let us look at the following examples:

Congratulations!
No War Yes Peace.
Devika was here.

All the above mentioned examples are secluded word, phrase or a sentence. But all of them give an idea to us as to when, where and who has spoken them.

For linguists, these are real instances of languages. The first example 1, may mean that somebody has applauded someone else’s success.

The example in 2, may state a line written on a placard which talks about peace on Earth. The example stated in 3 means that the above mentioned line may be scribbled on a stone wall on a fort or may be neatly typed in the script of a play.

In the similar fashion, these instances could be very well received by many different listeners

– a fellow soldier, a football stadium crowd, an airhostess, a doctor, or a bunch of jazz dance learners. The activity in which the participants are involved as well as the setting of communication would then also vary accordingly. As a consequence, in each case, not only the abstract linguistic units but the wholes of language, intentions and situations should also be considered. These wholes combine speech, writing, gesture, posture and so on and integrate linguistic organization. Provided that these conditions are fulfilled, 1, 2 and 3 can communicate effectively.

All Linguistic communication involves linguistic acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word or sentence, but rather the production or issuance of the symbol, word or sentences in the performance of the speech act.

The study of speech acts enables the understanding of the social, psychological, cultural, historical and similar other dimensions of communication. They are not mere artificial linguistic constructs as it may seem, their understanding together with the acquaintance of context in which they are performed are often essential for decoding the whole utterance and its proper meaning.

A speech act in linguistics and the philosophy of language is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication. According to Kent Bach, “almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker’s intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one’s audience.” The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin’s development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and congratulating.

The concept speech act was proposed by John Langshaw Austin, one of the founders of pragmatics, in the series of William James lectures which were delivered by him at Harvard in 1955. Eventually, his work was published in the book entitled How to Do Things with Words (1965). This concept was later developed by John Searle. Speech act theory believes in identifying utterances and turns as actual actions. This theory not only considers language used by the speaker but studies change in the state of behavior of the speaker as well as the listener at the time of communication.J. L. Austin for the first time studied language from a different point of view and brought into notice that apart from statements true and false, and truth conditions there are other possibilities in language, which are non-assertive categories that include questions, commands, exclamations etc. He studied language from non- conventional point-of-view which is a kind of reaction to the traditional view of language.

Besides Austin, John Searle contributed a lot to the speech act theory. Although a speech act is concerned with the ‘performative’ aspect of utterances, a speech act has many other dimensions. According to speech act, language is used to make things happen. Human beings have a wide choice of linguistic expressions and they try to make it as effective as possible. The choice of language depends upon a number of factors, like social customs, traditions, culture, relationship between speakers and the kind of situation.

Classifications

Speech Act theory classifies speech acts into three types:

Locutionary Act

Illocutionary Act

Perlocutionary Act

The locutionary act is the act of saying something with a certain meaning and reference. Locutionary act in a larger sense refers to all communication media, both sent and received. From the receiver’s point of view, communication media is not important at the beginning of the communication. But, on the other hand, there are verbal and nonverbal communication acts within the locutionary acts. These acts are received as entity and are hence subjected to further interpretation.

For example,

Don’t go to the jungle!
Counts as a warning: The speaker is trying to persuade someone not to go to the jungle which is considered dangerous in that particular context.

You should studyharder.

Counts as an encouragement: the speaker is trying to encourage the listener to burn midnight oil to achieve more success.

He said to me “Sing along!”

Counts as motivation: the speaker is is trying to persuade the listener to get involved in the act of singing.

Illocutionary Act is referred to as the act performed in saying something. Illocutionary force is the speaker’s intent. It is also considered as a true ‘speech act’.It relates to various kinds of psychological modes that make the basis of communication as its teleological base. Both acts, locutionary and illocutionary are invoked by the sender/speaker. According to the conception adopted by Bach and Harnish in ‘Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts’ (1979), an illocutionary act is an attempt to communicate, which they analyse as the expression of an attitude. Another conception of the illocutionary act goes back to Schiffer’s book ‘Meaning’ (1972, 103), in which the illocutionary act is represented as just the act of meaning something.

He informed me about the corruption of the committee members.
Counts as an information: the speaker’s intent is to transfer the information to the listener.
Leave the room.
Counts as an order:The speaker has ordered the listener/s to leave the room.
I hereby declare you the knight of Gwinder Falls.
Counts as a declaration: The speaker has declared the listener as the knight of Gwinder Falls.

Illocutionary act can be further divided into the following types:

assertives = it represents state of affairs. E.g. stating, claiming, suggesting, telling, insisting, asserting or describing

For example

I saw a beautiful flower which was plucked by a girl.
Sunita went to Kanpur to protest against tanneries.

directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice

Close the window!
Get out my room!
Go to the playground!

commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths

I will return this pen to you tomorrow.
I will bring harmony to this city again.
I promise to be the harbinger of security in our house.

expressives = speech acts that express on the speaker’s attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks

Your speech was commendable.
I am not well. Please excuse me from the meeting.
I thank the citizens of Lesotho for supporting me during the elections.

declarations = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife.

For example:

I now pronounce you man and wife!
The owner of Tiru cabs is hereby sentenced to prison for five years.
Mr Gandon will persecuted according to the law for theft and arsony.

Perlocutionary acts are the acts which are attributed to the effect of the utterances of a sentence. According to Austin, an utterance of a sentence of the speaker is the performance of an illocutionary act of having a certain force, which is different from the locutionary act of uttering the sentence, which is to have a meaning, and also from the perlocutionary act performed by uttering the sentence, which is to achieve certain effects. Perlocutionary act is a speech act that have an effect on the feelings, thoughts or actions of either the speaker or the listener. This includes persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise affecting the listener. It is to be noticed here that while examining perlocutionary acts, the effect on the hearer or reader is put on focus.

I have an extra concert ticket for the Coldplay. Would you like to attend it?

○ Counts as an impressing someone: the speaker might be acting courteous by offering an extra ticket to the listener. But implicitly he/she is also trying to impress someone or encourage someone to a particular type of music.

You should join Persian classes. Don’t you think?

○ Counts as persuading someone: the speaker is trying to persuade the listener to join Persian classes.

By the way, there is a newly opened deli round the corner; care to join me?

○ Counts as offer but implicit effect might be to impress the listener: the speaker is trying to enlighten the listener to try out some new type of cuisine.

Mary saw Kathy.
It is snowing.

Assertion is a speech act whereby the speaker puts forward a proposition as true or, secondarily, the proposition affirmed in such an act. The main tool for making assertions is the declarative sentence, spoken or written. Assertion is the default value of a declarative utterance or inscription.

Fareed will play in the park.

Zaheer is a good boy.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts. It can be written as well as spoken. According to M Stubbs

The term discourse analysis is very ambiguous. I will use it in this book to refer mainly to the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study the organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that discourse analysis is also concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction or dialogue between speakers.

– Stubbs 1983:1)

Moreover, it involves the use of language in a running discourse , continued over a number of sentences, and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer ) and auditor (or reader) in a specific situational context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions.

– Abrams and Harpham , A Glossary of Literary Terms , 2005).

Spoken Discourse Analysis: study of conversations, dialogues, spoken monologues, and so on.
Written Discourse Analysis: study of written texts, such as essays, news, political speeches and so on.
As linguists discourse analysis always tries to find out how language works and tries to improve our understanding of an important kind of human activity
As educators discourse analysis attempts to find out how good texts work, so that we can focus on teaching our students these writing/speaking strategies.
As critical analysts discourse analysis tries to discover meanings in the text which are not obvious on the surface (e.g., analysing a politician’s speech to see their preconceptions).

Discourse is essential in communicating thoughts and ideas. People around the world communicate their ideas through stretches of language. In order to understand any discourse, we must understand the devices used to analysis it.

Some of the common devices for Discourse analysis are:

Discourse and Frames

Turn Taking

Discourse Markers

Grice’s Maxims

Let us now try to understand each device with elaboration.

Reframing is a way to talk about going back and re-interpreting the meaning of the first sentence. Frame analysis is a type of discourse analysis that asks, What activity are speakers engaged in when they say this? What do they think they are doing by talking in this way at this time?

For example, one needs to know the type of text one is reading while one is reading a text in a newspaper. One must identify if the given text is a news or an editorial, or an advertisement to get a better grasp on the text. This also enables us to interpret the text much more easily.

Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In many contexts, conversation turns are a valuable means to participate in social life and have been subjected to competition.

Turn taking usually involves processes for:

constructing contributions
responding to previous comments
transitioning to a different speaker
using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic cues.

There are different ways of indicating that a turn will be changed:

Formal methods: for example, selecting the next speaker by name or raising a hand.

Adjacency pairs: for instance, a question requires an answer.

Intonation: for instance, a drop in pitch or in loudness.

Gesture : for instance, a change in sitting position or an expression of inquiry.

The most important device for indicating turn-taking is through a change in gaze direction.

A discourse marker is a word or phrase that plays a role in managing the flow and structure of a discourse. Discourse markers are more commonly referred to as ‘linking words’ and ‘linking phrases’, or ‘sentence connectors’. If a text lacks sufficient discourse markers, then a text would not seem logically constructed and the connections between the different sentences and paragraphs would not be intelligible to the readers.

Some of the commonly used discourse markers are:

Cohesion refers to the ties and connections which exist within texts that link different parts of sentences or larger unit of discourse.

Some of the cohesive devices which help in achieving Cohesion are:

Synonyms – is a word that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy.

■ Jump and leap

■ Big and huge

■ Beautiful and comely

Transitional words improve the connections and transitions between sentences and paragraphs.

For example:

• Afterwards

• As a result

• Therefore

• On the other hand

• Accordingly

Exemplification: By exemplifying, we provide an instance, or several instances, of a certain phenomenon; by enumerating different instance of the same phenomenon. This aids in making the argument in the text convincing.

Examples include:

For instance

Ellipsis: Ellipsis is a series of dots ‘…’ that usually indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section by the author from a text without altering its original meaning. It is also a literary device. The essential characteristic of ellipsis is is something that is present in the selection of underlying (systematic) option that omitted in the structure. An omission may include an omission of noun, verb or a clause.

Anaphoric Relation

With the help of anaphoric relation interpretation of text happens from some previously expressed idea or an entity.

He did that there.

Cataphoric Relation

It means to refer something forward. In other words, it refers to the identity of what is being expressed and what is to be expressed.

Here is the actor, John Levitt.

As he ran, Mr Tandon was caught by the police.

For the sake of her sanity, Kavita was allowed to walk outside the asylum compound.

Coherence refers to the degree to which a piece of text makes sense. Coherence is normally achieved through syntactical features such as the use of deictic, anaphoric and cataphoric elements or a logical tense structure, as well as presuppositions and implications connected to general world knowledge.

Grice (1975) set Four Maxims which say that in conversational exchanges the participants are in fact co-operating with each other.

Maxim of Quantity

This maxim states that make your contribution as informative as is required but not more or less than is required.

Maxim of Quality

Maxim of quality states that one should not say that which one believes to be false or for which one lacks evidence.

Maxim of Relation

Maxim of relation tells us to be relevant.

Maxim of Manner

Maxim of manner suggests us to be clear, brief and orderly.

The undeniable merit of speech act theory lies in advancing a view of language use as action.

In Searle’s words

[A] theory of language is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a rule governed form of behaviour. Now, being rule-governed, it has formal features which admit of independent study. But a study purely of those formal features, without a study of their role in speech acts, would be like a formal study of the currency and credit systems of economies without a study of the role of currency and credit in economic transactions. A great deal can be said in the study of language without studying speech acts, but any such purely formal theory is necessarily incomplete. It would be as if baseball were studied only as a formal system of rules and not as a game.

– Searle 1969:17

Discourse analysis is a hybrid field of enquiry. However, this complexity and mutual influencing should not be mistaken for “compatibility” between the various traditions. Nor is compatibility necessarily a desirable aim, as much is to be gained from the exploration of problematical and critical edges and from making the most of theoretical tensions. Traditions and crossover phenomena are best understood historically – in antagonistic terms and as subject to internal developments.

Austin, John L., 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, “The economics of linguistic exchanges’, Social Science Information, 16:6, 645-668.
Coulthard, Malcolm, 1985. An introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.
Jaworski Adam & Coupland Nikolas, 1999. The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge.
Searle, John, 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle John, 1983. Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stubbs Michael, 1983. Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Thomas, Jenny, 1986. The Dynamics of Discourse. A Pragmatic Analysis of Confrontational Interaction. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Lancaster University.
Torfing, Jacob, 1999. New Theories of Discourse. Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Speech act theory and the analysis of conversations. Sequencing and interpretation in pragmatic theory

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One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics1 is the idea that a theory of linguistic communication is really only a special case of a general theory of human action. According to this view, the various linguistic subdisciplines such as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics should be regarded as the studies of different abstract aspects of underlying communicative actions.

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The paper reconstructs and discusses three different approaches to the study of speech acts: (i) the intentionalist approach, according to which most illocutionary acts are to be analysed as utterances made with the Gricean communicative intentions, (ii) the institutionalist approach, which is based on the idea of illocutions as institutional acts constituted by systems of collectively accepted rules, and (iii) the interactionalist approach, the main tenet of which is that performing illocutionary acts consists in making conventional moves in accordance with patterns of social interaction. It is claimed that, first, each of the discussed approaches presupposes a different account of the nature and structure of illocutionary acts, and, second, all those approaches result from one-sided interpretations of Austin’s conception of verbal action. The first part of the paper reconstructs Austin's views on the functions and effects of felicitous illocutionary acts. The second part reconstructs and considers three different research developments in the post-Austinian speech act theory—the intentionalist approach, the institutionalist approach, and the interactionalist approach.

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There is evidence for the existence across all known languages of three basic clause types: declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Though this distinction in grammatical mood may be reflected in quite different ways (syntactic, morphological, lexical, etc.) in different languages, cross-linguistically we find a robust generalization: The choice of mood in a clausal utterance is reflected in a default correlation to one of the three basic types of move in a language game: making an assertion (declarative), posing a question (interrogative), or proposing to one's addressee(s) the adoption of a goal (imperative). This is in striking contrast to the lack of regular correlation between the conventional content of constituents and speech act types in the tradition of Austin and Searle. This paper sketches an approach to speech acts in which mood does not semantically determine illocutionary force. In a clause, the conventional content of mood determines the semantic type of the clause, and, given the nature of discourse, that type most naturally lends itself to serving as a particular type of speech act, i.e. to serving as one of the three basic types of language game moves. The type of semantics for grammatical mood that I assume is illustrated here with the imperative. As in earlier work, I take discourse to be a certain type of language game, with felicity tightly constrained by the goals and intentions of the interlocutors and, in particular, by the question under discussion. This pragmatic framework, together with the proposed semantics of mood, permits us to explain the kinds of contextual factors that lead to the attested Searlean interpretations of particular speech acts, and is compatible with a simple account of performatives in which performativity is epiphenomenal on the semantics of the predicates in question when used with a 1 st person subject.

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