Searle's Speech Acts in a Theory of Language Use

This paper is an integrative appraisal of Searle’s speech act theory. The nature of speech acts makes them worthy of scholarly attention. Most speech acts are focused and directed as they are encoded by the speaker and decoded by the hearer. They are intended to have a certain point, and they are intended to be understood as such. This investigation explores Lawal’s Communicative Model Theory and Acheoah’s Pragma-crafting Theory to contend for a vibrant, all-encompassing speech act theory and establish the strengths and weaknesses of Searle’s speech act theory. This study finds that: the notions “speaker’s intention” and “linguistic convention” mentioned in Searle’s speech act theory are loosely used. Context-phenomenon is not extensively discussed in Searle’s theory in which speakers’ intention is the core. Without a context-sensitive, integrative theoretical framework, the investigation of the contextual nuances which determine the use and interpretation of language remains a futile endeavour. Like Austin’s speech act theory, Searle’s speech act theory strongly recommends “linguistic conventions” for the performance of speech acts at the expense of a wide range of discourse constraints

Language and Dialogue, 2013

Dialogue and Universalism, 1, 2013, 129-142., 2013

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.

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.

ELSYA : Journal of English Language Studies

Before John Searle wrote the book of Speech Acts, he wrote an article about “What is a Speech Act?” (in Philosophy in America, Max Black, ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 221–239). He was born in Denver in 1932. He spent some seven years in Oxford, beginning as an undergraduate in the autumn of 1952 with a Rhodes Scholarship, and concluding as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church. He has spent almost all of his subsequent life as Professor of Philosophy in Berkeley according to Smith (2003). This article aims to review the speech act theories by Searle (1969) to know what the theories of speech acts according to him to aid researchers understand more on how to apply it in real social life. Moreover, this article’s references are accurate (valid) and they well argued. This article is highly recommended for the philosopher, specialists and analysts in the field of pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and conversational analysis, communication studie...

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.

Language & Communication, 2002

This paper argues for an Austin-inspired conception of speech acts as context-changing social actions. It explores some ways of conceiving of context in order to determine how context should be defined in this framework. It observes that the context against which Austin assesses infelicities consists of aspects of the world, while according to other speech act theorists, starting from John Searle, felicity conditions require that speakers have certain intentions and other appropriate attitudes. It argues that the context of a speech act should be considered as constructed as opposed to merely given, limited as opposed to extendible in any direction, and objective as opposed to cognitive. It explores whether these claims might be incompatible with each other, concluding that they are consistent. Finally, it takes into consideration the context-changing role of speech acts and the difference between its illocutionary dimension and its perlocutionary one.

Language As Social Action, 2013

Given the diversity and number of disciplines that take an interest in the social aspects of language use, providing an interdisciplinary perspective on this topic would be a challenging prospect for many scholars. Holtgraves, a social psychologist, meets this challenge in an admirable fashion. The book's stated aim, as outlined in the introductory chapter "The Social Bases of Language and Linguistic Underpinnings of Social Behavior," is to approach the topic of language use as social action from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, and the material covered is an impressive, wide ranging synthesis of research from the fields of philosophy, linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, anthropology, and cognitive and social psy- chology. Fundamental to the approach taken is the reciprocal relationship between language and social context: How the social dimensions of language cannot be ignored and how social psychological processes are mediated by language. A chapter is devoted to each of five major themes of language use: language as action, lan- guage as interpersonal action, language as contextualized action, language as coordinated action, and language as thoughtful action. Chapter One, "Speech Acts and Intentions: The Things We Do With Words," reviews the core aspects of speech act theory, starting with Austin's (1962) funda- mental insight in explicating the pragmatic function of language, and moving onto a description of Searle's (1969) speech act taxonomy and felicity conditions. A discussion that may be of more interest to those already familiar with the basic tenets of speech act theory is intentionality. e.c. how hearers recognize illocutionary force is a problematic issue, particularly in the case of indirect speech acts, where the intended illocutionary force differs from the literal illocutionary force. Two contrasting approaches are considered: those that assume inferential processing, e.g., theory of conversational implicatures, and those that suggest a direct or idiomatic approach to recognition. Holtgraves observes that illocutionary force interpretation has been studied much less than illocutionary force production, and regards this lack of attention paid to the hearer as a deficit in speech act theory's social credentials. Language as interpersonal action is addressed in the next two chapters. Chapter Two, "The Interpersonal Underpinnings of Talk: Face Management and Politeness," considers the interpersonal aspects of language production. A succinct review of Brown and influential politeness theory model is provided, with a discussion of the concept of face, face-threatening acts, and the Issues in Applied Linguistics