Locution, illocution, perlocution

2022

The present paper develops the concept of discourse within Austin's original speech act theory as laid out in Austin, J. L., [1962]1975 How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, and provides a model to explain illocutionary acts in discourse. In uttering something, a speaker performs an illocutionary act and imports its conventional effect into the discourse, in which the next speaker (the hearer in the preceding turn) performs an illocutionary act and brings about its effect, and the sequenced effects develop the discourse. Both the content of an utterance imported into the discourse as the illocutionary effect and the discursive sequence that the utterance creates are sensitive to the illocutionary-act-type that it performs. Quotation is examined from this perspective, and it is claimed that a speaker indicates a locution by means of quotation marks while performing an illocutionary act. The speaker (i) performs an illocutionary act pertaining to the locution, (ii) reports an illocutionary (or perlocutionary) act in another discourse by means of the locution by which the act was performed (or a part of it), or (iii) indicates a part of the locution of the present utterance, and thus signals a special sense or referent, or importance. Depending on the type of illocutionary act, the quoted material is imported into the discourse in a specific way.

Augustinian: A Journal for Humanities, Social Sciences, Business, and Education., Vol. 19, Issue #1, pp. 35-45, 2018

The speech act theory is one of the rigorous attempts to systematically explain the workings of language. It is not only widely influential in the philosophy of language, but in the areas of linguistics and communication as well. This essay traces the development of this theory from J. L. Austin's first formulation of the theory to John Searle's further systematization and grounding of it. The essay first situates the theory in the general approaches to the philosophy of language. After which, it explicates the main features of the theory as initially articulated by Austin and further improved by Searle. Among the innovations introduced by Searle, the essay highlights the following: the distinction between the utterance and propositional acts, the distinction between the effects of illocutionary acts and those of perlocutionary acts, a consistent set of criteria for classifying speech acts, and the grounding of speech acts in terms of rules and facts.

Inquiry, 2020

In this article I argue that the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts needs examination, not just in its details but in its philosophical standing. We need to consider whether the distinction is motivated by (sometimes unwittingly) assumed problematic philosophical assumptions concerning the nature of our dependence on the words of others and the rationality of speech reception. Working with an example of the act of telling, I argue against the idea that the distinction is self-evident or easy to draw. By developing an analogy with perception, I argue further that defending the distinction requires one to engage in an argumentative dialectic with powerful alternative positions. I end by suggesting that taking the challenge further would require us to look more closely at how passivity and rationality might be reconciled in the reception of speech.

One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics 1 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. Explanation of variation within each subdiscipline should preferably be functional, i.e. it should relate the properties of the phenomenon being examined to the function of a communicative action as a whole. If this task could be accomplished, the functionalist claim is that linguistic theory would simultaneously achieve both increased exhaustiveness and greater internal coherence and simplicity.

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2009

Over the past decades speech act theory has evolved in many directions and, as a result, it may be more reasonable to talk about speech act theories than one received model. Most of the contemporary developments explicitly refer to John L. Austin and John Searle as their mentors. However, the (still growing) heritage has been used in a selective way and some of the newer approaches are not mutually compatible. What remains constant through all of them is the focus on language as a type (and means) of action and the underlying belief that communication is composed of linguistic acts. It is also important that these acts are not performed in isolation, but typically, in natural communication, form complex structures. It is, at least partly, the evasive nature of the interplay between the linguistic form used and the context in which it appears that constitutes the puzzle of performativity and illocutionary force.

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the meaningful intentional purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is nothing but the development of an intuition by the subject thus transforming it in words of a language. It is both individual and social. Since human subjects are free and historical, the study of speech acts is hermeneutics, that is, interpreting speech acts with knowing and the human reality.

SPEECH ACT THEORY A HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT, 2025

Speech act theory, from the perspective of pragmatics, is a concept that is continually developing within the realm of linguistics. While Austin and Searle"s models provided the conceptual frameworks that contribute to ongoing scholarship, contemporary research also identifies a need for further adapting established models as analysts examine issues impacting subjects, organizations, and nations in the 21 st century. In this context, the primary objective of this article is to offer an overview of the historical evolution of Speech Act Theory and to illustrate how these theoretical evaluations enhance the dissertation's examination of speech acts as processes that impact distinct populations in diverse manners.

2020

Reconsideration of legal phenomena by legal language means is a typical feature of analytical tradition in the legal philosophy, since legal regulations are expressed not only in language, but are inextricably linked with the linguistic content of rules whilst applying them. Language as a form of communication and representation of the world is a holistic and specific phenomenon, that is localized in speech acts that form subject's intentions and his further actions. It is necessary to count the meaningful use of signs for the reality perception, that form the language. Legal reality and its language forms are inseparable, and thus, we can learn more deeply the essence of legal phenomena by interpreting legal texts and speech acts that illustrate legal intentions and actions. So in the speech acts theory of J.L. Austin introduces the category of com missives , denoting the obligations declared by the intentions of the person (promise, agree, intend, plan, provide, allow, swear, etc.). In legal language speech acts are used with the purposes of execution, prohibition, coercion for maintenance of a social order, therefore legal discourse has performative character. Performative expressions in legal language are characterized by speech stereotypes due to repetitive procedures (for example, procedural actions in criminal proceedings or court hearings). If it is a question of acts of application of the right, from the point of view of their performative form they have declarative character, that is contain instructions and obligations of legal character. The illocutionary function of these proposals is to form a respectful attitude to the established norms, and the perlocutive force is to impose compliance with these norms. The question of the relation of speech acts and actions in a different context was considered by Gilbert Ryle.

This paper is intended to give insights to the readers about development of speech act theories which include categories, characteristics, validities, and strategies. The research begins with the classification of speech acts done by some experts and continues with description of characteristics and validities carried out especially by Austin and Searle, and ends with speech act strategies developed by Parker and Riley, using examples taken from Indonesian, Javanese, Balinese, and English, four languages that the writer masters relatively well. Most of Indonesian, Balinese, and Javanese data together with their context are created intuitively as a native or nearly-native speaker while some English utterances are created and the others extracted from pragmatic text books used as references in this study. Research findings show that there are various types of speech acts, and each speech act has its own validity conditions. Among them, illocutionary acts constitute the focal point of pragmatics' studies. The description shows that every expert of pragmatics uses different categories in classifying illocutionary acts, and the kinds of strategies used to express them.

Pragmatics & Cognition, 1996

Sadock, Jerrold. 1994. Toward a Realistic Typology of Speech Acts. in S. L. Tsohatzidis, ed. Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, 393-406. London: Routledge, In contrast to the largely unmotivated, highly redundant , and partially incoherent, classificatory systems that are found in the influential works of Austin and Searle, I suggest that a more reasonable typology of speech acts should be based on three independent aspects of what kinds of information are encoded when we speak. 1) First, there an informational, representational aspect in which conversational negotiations are conducted in terms of propositions that can be judged for accuracy against real or possible conditions. This dimension corresponds in a way to Grice's notion of what is said; 2) then there is an effective, social aspect by means of which conventional effects on societally determined features of the world are portrayed and often achieved that corresponds to Austin's notion of illocutions 3) and last an affective, emotive aspect that is used to give vent to and/or to display real or apparent feelings of the speaker . Here some of what Searle intends to capture in his sincerity conditions is encoded. I will suggest that some of the most ordinary speech act types are characterized by very basic values in each of these motivated dimensions.

S. L. Tsohatzidis (ed.): Interpreting Austin: Critical Essays. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2017, pp. 34-59. , 2017

Austin (1962) introduced not only the notion of an illocutionary act, but also that of a locutionary act, which consists in a rhetic, a phatic, and a phonetic act.This paper will outline a novel semantics of verbs of saying and of quotation based on Austin’s distinction among levels of linguistic acts. It will propose a particular way of understanding the notion of a rhetic act and argue that it is extremely well-reflected in the semantics of natural language. The paper will furthermore outline a novel, unified and compositional semantics of quotation which is guided by two ideas. First, quotations convey properties related to lower-level (phonetic or phatic) linguistic acts; second, such meanings of quotations are strictly based on syntactic structure, namely a lower-level (phonetic, phonological or morpho-syntactic) structure as part of the syntactic structure that is input to semantic interpretation. Such lower-level linguistic structures will contribute properties of utterances to the semantic composition of the sentence, in one way or another.

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2009

The aim of this paper is to outline a way of conceiving of the conventionality of illocutionary acts grounded in Austin’s original ideas. While the indispensability of the securing of uptake is widely accepted as a hallmark of illocution, it has also been taken as evidence of the intention-based nature of illocutionary acts as opposed to their conventionality. The paper discusses the readings of the “securing of uptake” offered by Strawson and Searle and comments on the divide between communicative and conventional speech acts. It then argues that illocutionary acts are conventional because they have conventional effects and that the bringing about of such effects is bound up with the indispensability of the securing of uptake. This explains in what sense, according to Austin, the performative use of illocutionary verbs (which may help the speaker secure uptake) is a hallmark of the conventionality of illocution.

1990

That uses of language not only can, but even normally do, have the character of actions was a fact largely unrealized by those engaged in the study of language before the present century, at least in the sense that there was lacking any attempt to come to terms systematically with the action-theoretic peculiarities of language use.

The article investigates the terminological apparatus of Speech Act Theory, in particular its central concept - the speech act. The author considers theoretical principles of Speech Act Theory, relying on the works of the founders of this linguistic theory and their followers. In the first part of this article definitions are provided of the components of the speech act: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, as well as concepts such as performative, illocutionary force, direct and indirect speech act. By means of an analytic review of sources on the problems of the Speech Act Theory the author clarifies and complements the above-mentioned debatable concepts of Speech Act Theory. In the second part of this article the three main classifications of speech acts of the British linguist John Austin, American linguist George Searle and Russian linguists Yuri Apresyan and Ivan Shatunovsky are described. It is noted that although the above-mentioned classifications of speech acts are based on their different features, but they still only consider their illocutionary force, which is not always obvious in indirect speech acts. Therefore, the drawback of all these classifications is that they can only be used for the classification of direct speech acts. In conclusion, the author points out the necessity of further study of indirect speech acts and methods of identifying them for the future development of the Speech Act Theory and understanding of the principles of language work. Key-words: Speech Act Theory, Speech Act, locutionary act, illocutionary act, perlocutionary act, performative, illocutionary force.