Speech Act Theory

Speech Act theory. Speech acts are staples of everyday communicative life. It has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory, and other scholarly disciplines. Recognition of the importance 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, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become transparent. In turn, speech allows them to be interconnected with each other. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including the part concerned with describing reality. Recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structureunderlying linguistic practice (Ideology and Speech-Act Theory).

It further divides the actions of words in several categories and sees a limited number of actions a speaker or writer could do with words, such as promise, declare, express, and a few others. Austin’s famous example of saying, “I do” in the right setting changes the status from unmarried to married. “Do you take this woman to be your wedded wife?” “I do.” In other circumstances, one can say “I do” and nothing much changes in word. “Do you like chocolates?” “I do.” In both cases, the words mean the same thing, but the action of the speaker is different. One declares an ontological change from a bachelor to a husband. The latter expresses a preference as trivial as a chocolate. There were several theorists who took up Austin’s insights and further developed Speech Act Theory including PaulRicour, John Searle, and many others. Before being incorporated into linguistics, Speech Act Theory, was first taken up by the law profession. What people are doing and intending to do with language is important in a courtroom, legal documents and legal disputes. How people understand the written work that is the Bible, has also fallen under this new understanding. It will have the power to shape and to understand what the writers are trying to do with their words and how people understand theology in the coming years Tsohatzidis (34-46).

In general speech acts are specialized tools of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. In simple analogy, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker’s intention and the attitude being expressed.

The theory of speech acts aims to do justice to the fact that through words, (phrases, sentences, encoded information) people do more things with words than convey information. When people do convey information, they often impart more than what their words denote. Although the focus of speech act theory has been on utterances, especially those made in conversational and other face-to-face situations, the phrase ‘speech act’ should be taken as a generic term for any sort of language use, oral and such. Speech acts, whatever the medium of their performance, fall under the broad category of intentional action, with which they share certain general features Austin (23-33).

Austin divides the linguistic act into three components. First, there is the locutionary act: the act of saying’ something. Second, there is the illocutionary act: the performance of an act in saying something. Third, there is the perlocutionary act: for saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, of the speaker, or of other persons. In other words, a locutionary act has meaning; it produces an understandable utterance. An illocutionary act has force; it is informed with certain tone, attitude, feeling, motive, or intention. A perlocutionary act has consequence; it has an effect upon the addressee. By describing an imminently dangerous situation (locutionary component) in a tone that is designed to have the force of a warning (illocutionary component), the speaker may actually frighten the addressee into moving (perlocutionary component).

These three components, then, are not altogether separable, for as Austin points out, “one must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued –the total speech act—if one is to see the parallelism between statements and performative utterances and how each can go wrong. Indeed, there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances.” In contradiction to structuralism, then, speech act theory privileges parole over language, arguing that external context—the context of situation—is more important in the order of explanation than internal context—the interrelationships among terms within the system of signs (Ideology and Speech-Act Theory).

Click the video to view the Speech Act Theory Presentation done by Peter Vogt