speech act

Rajendra Pokharel
M. Ed. Second Year
Roll No. 33
Ram Chandra
Semantics and Pragmatics
Kathmandu Shiksha Campus

An analysis on John L. Austin's Speech act Theory
Speech act theory, a modern philosophical approach to language, which has challenged the long standing assumption of philosophers that human utterances consist exclusively of true or false statements about the world. Initiated by the English philosopher J. L. Austin in lectures published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), speech act theory begins with the distinction between ‘constative’ utterances (which report truly or falsely on some external state of affairs) and performatives (which are verbal actions in themselves—such as promising—rather than true or false statements). Further analysis reveals that a single utterance may comprise three distinct kinds of speech act: in addition to its simple ‘locutionary’ status as a grammatical utterance, it will have an illocutionary force i.e. an active function such as threatening, affirming, or reassuring, and probably a perlocutionary force i.e. an effect on the listener or reader.
Locutionary Act:
In Linguistics and the Philosophy of mind, a locutionary act is the performance of an utterance, and hence of a speech act. The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to Austin's posthumous How To Do Things With Words, a speech act should analysed as a locutionary act (ie the actual utterance and it's ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus it's real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (ie it's actual effect, whether intended or not). For example, my saying to you "Don't go into the water" (a locutionary act with distinct phonetic, syntactic and semantic features) counts as warning you not to go into the water (an illocutionary act), and if you heed my warning I have thereby succeeded in persuading you not to go into the water (a perlocutionary act). This taxonomy of speech acts was inherited by John R. Searle, Austin's pupil at Oxford and subsequently an influential exponent of speech act theory.
Illocutionary Act:
Illocutionary act is a technical term introduced by John L. Austin in investigations concerning what he calls 'performative' and 'constative utterances'. According to Austin's original exposition in How to Do Things With Words, an illocutionary act is an act (1) for the performance of which I must make it clear to some other person that the act is performed (Austin speaks of the 'securing of uptake'), and (2) the performance of which involves the production of what Austin calls 'conventional consequences' as, e.g., rights, commitments, or obligations. For example, in order to successfully perform a promise I must make clear to my audience that the promise occurs, and undertake an obligation to do the promised thing: hence promising is an illocutionary act in the present sense. However, for certain reasons, among them insufficient knowledge of Austin's original exposition, the term 'illocutionary act' is nowadays understood in a number of other ways. Many define the term with reference to examples, saying such things as that any speech act like stating, asking, commanding, promising, and so on is an illocutionary act; they then often fail to give any sense of the expression illocutionary act capable of making clear what being an illocutionary act essentially consists in.
It is also often emphasised that Austin introduced the illocutionary act by means of a contrast with other kinds of acts: the illocutionary act, he says, is an act performed in saying something, as contrasted with a locutionary act, the act of saying something, and also contrasted with a perlocutionary act, an act performed by saying something. But it may be misleading to distinguish between 'kinds' of acts, for these are not separate categories of speech, but instead describe different levels on which speech might work. Any one particular speech event may have any combination of locutionary, illocutionary or perlocutionary effects.
Still another conception of an illocutionary act goes back to Schiffer's famous book 'Meaning' (1972, 103), in which the illocutionary act is represented as just the act of meaning something. According to the conception Bach and Harnish adopt in 'Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts' (1979), an illocutionary act is an attempt to communicate, which they again analyse as the expressing of an attitude.
Perlocutionary Act:
A perlocutionary act (or perlocutionary effect) is a speech act, as viewed at the level of its psychological consequences , such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something. This is contrasted with locutionary and illocutionary acts (which are other levels of description, rather than different types of speech acts).
Unlike the notion of locutionary act, which describes the linguistic function of an utterance, a perlocutionary effect is in some sense external to the performance. It may be thought of, in a sense, as the effect of the illocutionary act. Therefore, when examining perlocutionary acts, the effect on the hearer or reader is emphasized. As an example, consider the following utterance: "By the way, I have a CD of Gajani; would you like to borrow it?" Its illocutionary function is an offer, while its intended perlocutionary effect might be to impress the listener, or to show a friendly attitude, or to encourage an interest in a particular type of film.
Works Cited
Austin, J. L. How to do things with words.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Austin, J. L. Philosophical papers (J. O. Urmson, & G. J. Warnock, Eds.). Oxford, UK, 1979.
Pitcher, George. "Austin: a personal memoir". Essays on J.L. Austin, ed. Isaiah Berlin et al. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.
Warnock, G.J. "John Langshaw Austin, a biographical sketch". Symposium on J. L. Austin, ed. K.T. Fann. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.
Warnock, G.J. "Saturday Mornings". Essays on J.L. Austin, ed. Isaiah Berlin et al. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973.
Rajendra Pokharel
M. Ed. Second Year
Roll No. 33
Ram Chandra
Semantics and Pragmatics
Kathmandu Shiksha Campus
A Survey on Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek word σημαντικός (semantikos), "significant", to signify, to indicate" and that from sema, "sign, mark, token". In linguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts. It has related meanings in several other fields.
Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning in an expression. For example, in the sentence, "John loves a bagel", the word bagel may refer to the object itself, which is its literal meaning or denotation, but it may also refer to many other figurative associations, such as how it meets John's hunger, etc., which may be its connotation. Traditionally, the formal semantic view restricts semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics, but many find this distinction difficult to defend. The degree to which a theorist subscribes to the literal-figurative distinction decreases as one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and even larger units of discourse (referred to as texts). The basic area of study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations between different linguistic units: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentricity / endocentricity, linguistic compounds. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of connotative sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax. Formal semanticists are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the semantics of logic. Thus the sentence John loves a bagel above can be broken down into its constituents (signs), of which the unit loves may serve as both syntactic and semantic head.
In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms of lambda calculus. Thus, the syntactic parse of the sentence above would now indicate loves as the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent, John, and the object, bagel, with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicate loves (John, bagel), thus linking semantics to categorial grammar models of syntax. The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives are basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 70s.
Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as :
situation semantics ('80s): Truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned based on context
generative lexicon ('90s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get assigned based on context
Situation semantics:
Situation semantics is an alternative to possible world semantics developed by Jon Barwise and John Perry in the early eighties. Situations, unlike worlds, are not complete in the sense that every proposition or its negation holds in a world. According to situation semantics, meaning is a relation between a discourse situation, a connective situation and a described situation. The original theory of Situations and Attitudes soon ran into foundational difficulties and had to be reformulated in Peter Aczel's non-well-founded set theory.
Generative Lexicon:
Generative Lexicon (GL) is a theory of linguistic semantics which focuses on the distributed nature of compositionality in natural language. The first major work outlining the framework is James Pustejovsky's "Generative Lexicon" (1991). Subsequent important developments are presented in Pustejovsky and Boguraev (1993), Bouillon (1997), and Busa (1996). The first unified treatment of GL was given in Pustejovsky (1995). Unlike purely verb-based approaches to compositionality, Generative Lexicon attempts to spread the semantic load across all constituents of the utterance. Central to the philosophical perspective of GL are two major lines of inquiry: (1) How is it that we are able to deploy a finite number of words in our language in an unbounded number of contexts? (2) Is lexical information and the representations used in composing meanings separable from our commonsense knowledge?