speech act semantics definition

Speech Acts

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century. [ 1 ] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines. [ 2 ] 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 less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

2.1 the independence of force and content, 2.2 can saying make it so, 2.3 seven components of illocutionary force, 3. illocutions and perlocutions, and indirect speech acts, 4. force, fit and satisfaction, 5.1 force conventionalism, 5.2. an objection to force conventionalism, 6.1 grice's account of speaker meaning, 6.2 objections to grice's account, 6.3 force as an aspect of speaker meaning, 7.1 speech acts and conversation analysis, 7.2 speech acts and scorekeeping, 8. force-indicators and the logically perfect language, 9. do speech acts have a logic, further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language. Accordingly in this entry I will consider the relation among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions, and implicature. This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

Above I shuddered with quotation marks around the expression ‘speech act theory’. It is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their most significant features. Consider a different case. Semantic theory deserves its name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By contrast, it is not clear that “speech act theory” has comparable credentials. One such credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there be. To that end I close with a brief discussion of the possibility, envisioned by some, of an “illocutionary logic”.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Construed as a bit of observable behavior, a given act may be done with any of a variety of aims. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, a given utterance, such as ‘You'll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of what those words mean. However, given the dizzying array of uses of ‘meaning’ in philosophy and related cognitive sciences, I will here refer instead to content. While different theories of content abound (as sets of possible worlds, sets of truth conditions, Fregean senses, ordered n -tuples, to name a few), the phenomenon is relatively clear: What the speaker said is that the addressee will be more punctual in the future. The addressee or observer who asks, “What is the force of those words?” is asking, of that content, how it's to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command. The addressee is not asking for a further elucidation of that content.

Or so it seems. Perhaps whether the utterance is meant as a threat, a prediction or a command will depend on some part of her content that was left unpronounced? According to this suggestion, really what she said was, “I predict you'll be more punctual,” or “I command you to be more punctual,” as the case may be. Were that so, however, she'd be contradicting herself in uttering ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ as a prediction while going on to point out, ‘I don't mean that as a prediction.’ While such a juxtaposition of utterances is surely odd, it is not a self-contradiction, any more than “It's raining but I don't believe it,” is a self-contradiction when the left conjunct is put forth as an expression of belief. What is more, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual,’ is itself a sentence with a content, and will be being put forth with some force or other when–as per our current suggestion—the speaker says it in the course of making a prediction. So that sentence, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual’ is put forth with some force–say as an assertion. This implies, according to the present suggestion, that really the speaker said, ‘I assert that I predict that you'll be more punctual.’ Continuing this same style of reasoning will enable us to infer that performance of a single speech act requires saying–though perhaps not pronouncing—infinitely many things. That is reason for rejecting the hypothesis that implied it, and for the rest of this entry I will assume that force is no part of content.

In chemical parlance, a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of the compound's properties. Analogously, it is often remarked that a proposition is itself communicatively inert; for instance, merely expressing the proposition that snow is white is not to make a move in a “language game”. Rather, such moves are only made by putting forth a proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further plausibility from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This common element is the proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius 1967, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That's why, from the fact that someone has said, “You'll be more punctual in the future,” we cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of speech acts, pragmatics studies, inter alia , their force. The bulk of this entry may be seen as an elucidation of force.

Need we bother with such an elucidation? That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning : Force is a feature not of what is meant but of how it is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 6 below.

Speech acts are not to be confused with acts of speech. One can perform a speech act such as issuing a warning without saying anything: A gesture or even a minatory facial expression will do the trick. So too, one can perform an act of speech, say by uttering words in order to test a microphone, without performing a speech act. [ 3 ] For a first-blush delineation of the range of speech acts, then, consider that in some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I can't lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now Treasurer of the Corporation.” Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.) A necessary and, perhaps, sufficient condition of a type of act's being a speech act is that acts of that type can–whether or not all are—be carried out by saying that one is doing so.

Saying can make it so, but that is not to suggest that any old saying by any speaker constitutes the performance of a speech act. Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, spends considerable effort detailing the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously . Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses . The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake : I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you don't accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of keeping the promise. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for a speech act of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which individual speech acts would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each one. [ 4 ]

Here are three further features of the “saying makes it so” condition. First, the saying appealed to in the “saying makes it so” test is not an act of speech: My singing in the shower, “I promise to meet you tomorrow for lunch,” when my purpose is simply to enjoy the sound of my voice, is not a promise, even if you overhear me. Rather, the saying (or singing) in question must itself be something that I mean. We will return in Section 6 to the task of elucidating the notion of meaning at issue here.

Second, the making relation that this “saying makes it so” condition appeals to needs to be treated with some care. My uttering, “I am causing molecular agitation,” makes it the case that I am causing molecular agitation. Yet causing molecular agitation is not a speech act on any intuitive understanding of that notion. One might propose that the notion of making at issue here marks a constitutive relation rather than a causal relation. That may be so, but as we'll see in Section 5, this suggests the controversial conclusion that all speech acts depend for their existence on conventions over and above those that imbue our words with meaning.

Finally, the saying makes it so condition has a flip side. Not only can I perform a speech act by saying that I am doing so, I can also rescind that act later on by saying (in the speech act sense) that I take it back. I cannot, of course, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or an assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also take it back. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by saying that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of a force such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

1. Illocutionary point : This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are; the characteristic point of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point : Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

3. Mode of achievement : This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.

4. Propositional content conditions : Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control. I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law.

5. Preparatory conditions : These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.

6. Sincerity conditions : Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions : Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting” of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F 1 and F 2 are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, and I cannot convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the reduction of adipose tissue. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight, but some flightless creatures have wings.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do this by noting that one can urge by saying, “I urge you to shut the door,” while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you by saying, “I persuade you to shut the door.” A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act. (1962, p. 107)

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, a speech act can be performed by virtue of the performance of another one. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1975b).

Indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. In asking whether you are intending to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might indeed jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without suggesting anything. Similarly, the advertiser who tells us that Miracle Cream reversed hair loss in Bob, Mike, and Fred, also most likely hopes that I will believe it will reverse my own hair loss. That does not show that he is (indirectly) asserting that it will. Whether he is asserting this depends, it would seem, on whether he can be accused of being a liar if in fact he does not believe that Miracle Cream will staunch my hair loss.

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. My remark that Miracle Cream helped Bob, Mike and Fred is also an assertion that it will help you only if I intend to be so committed. What is more, these intentions must be feasibly discernible on the part of one's audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I have not done so. I need to make that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by virtue of inference to the best explanation. All else being equal, the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so. All else equal, the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is my intention to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope that you do so. Bertolet 1994, however, develops an even more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker's intentional state–hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is explanatorily unmotivated.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature–that process by which we mean more than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation. (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle's 1979b account of indirect speech acts was in terms of conversational implicature. The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this connection in Section 7.

Force is often characterized in terms of the notions of direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction. The first of these may be illustrated with an example derived from Anscombe (1963). A woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to get; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists is the same, yet they differ along another dimension. For the contents of the husband's list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit : It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective's list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband's cart. As such, the detective's list has word-to-world direction of fit : The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying “Thank you,” and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., “Tell me who is at the door!”), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, “Hooray for Arsenal!” Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having “null” direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all. (The characterization is thus analogous to the way in which some non-classical logical theories describe some proposition as being neither True nor False, but as having a third truth value, N : Evidently that is not to say that such propositions are bereft of truth value.) It is difficult to discern from such accounts how one sheds light on a speech act in characterizing it as having a null direction of fit, as opposed to having no direction of fit at all. [ 5 ]

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts seem subject to norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, “How do you know?”, while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture. (Williamson 1996) Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit? This is not to say that the difference between assertion and conjecture cannot be expressed as a difference among Searle and Vanderveken's seven components of illocutionary force; for instance that difference might be thought of as a difference in parameter 2, namely the degree of strength of illocutionary point. Rather, what we are seeking is an account of, rather than a label for, that difference.

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction . This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: It is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction–truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, typically in a speech act, performed by an addressee, such as an assertion that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: An assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, and that may enable us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Section 7.

5. Mood, Force and Convention

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you've used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a question. After all, you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles John is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with contextual clues, intonation and so on to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism . According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of ‘I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,’ to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. J.L. Austin, who introduced the English-speaking world to the study of speech acts, seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of “felicity conditions” for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances… (1962, p. 14).

Austin's student Searle follows him in this, writing

…utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

…the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and …speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Force-conventionalism, even in the weaker form just adumbrated, has been challenged by Strawson, who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one's arms, and say, “I entreat you.” But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions….[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone's speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another's communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it is intended to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as entreating and excommunicating.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

An analogous point would not apply to the act of sending : Just from the facts that I am trying to send my addressee something, and that he recognizes that I am trying to do so (and what it is I am trying to send him), we cannot infer that I have succeeded in sending it to him. However, while Searle's point about telling looks more plausible at first glance than would a point about sending, it also is not accurate. Suppose I am trying to tell somebody that I love her, and that she recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my inability to get past the letter ‘l’. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in avowing my love for her. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won't inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. [ 6 ]

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act–we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, its gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of one or another form of commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? [ 7 ] Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning–a topic to which I now turn.

6. Speaker-Meaning and Force

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of what I mean that I happen to be speaking at the volume that I do. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is part of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, part of what I say–that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be a feature of how I mean what I do.

Let us elucidate this notion of speaker meaning (née non-natural meaning). In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two senses of ‘mean’. One sense is exemplified by remarks such as ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ and ‘Those spots mean measles.’ The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs ‘natural meaning’. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this sense of ‘mean’ from another sense of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying “You make a better door than a window”, George meant that you should move,

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there's quicksand over there,

Grice used the term ‘non-natural meaning’ for this sense of ‘mean’, and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term ‘speaker meaning’. [ 8 ] After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall heretofore call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might leave Smith's handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone's beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John's severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod's action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered hunters who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention .

It has, however, been shown that intentions to produce cognitive or other effects on an audience are not necessary for speaker meaning. Davis 1992 offers many cases of speaker meaning in the absence of reflexive communicative intentions. Indeed, he forcefully argues that speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Instead of intentions to produce certain effects in an audience, some authors have proposed that speaker meaning is a matter of overtly indicating some aspect of oneself. (Green, 2007). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it's a lot more plausible that I mean that it's raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P , it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P , and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, “How do you know that?” I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same “liability to error” way; but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P ; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content–where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one's intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

• conjecturing

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move from left to right we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, “How do you know that?”, and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The “educated guess” is intermediate between these two cases.)

We may think of this illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning as characterizing not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, “You're tired,” and my remark, “I'm tired,” as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P , followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P , as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed a bit further in Section 9 under the rubric of “mode” of illocutionary commitment.

Speaker meaning, then, applies not just to content but also to force, and we may elucidate that claim with a further articulation of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so—a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle's view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one's intention, or at least one's attempt, to perform that act. What is missing from Searle's characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one's heart (or mind) on one's sleeve.

7. Force, Norms, and Conversation

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have brought speech acts into their conversational context. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that–not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, it might reasonably be held that a speech act's ecological niche is nevertheless the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove it from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may leave us blind to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill's, A System of Logic , suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word's meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of so-called conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. [ 11 ] For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. More recently, Asher and Lascardes 2003 have defended a more systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that responds to Searle's challenge.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from certain traditions flowing from work in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974) Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the evolution of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of propositions (construed as the conversational “common ground”) that can be presupposed by interlocutors. (Such propositions may, but need not be, understood as sets of possible worlds.) Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, addressee, and so forth. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as “conversational score”.

“Scorekeeping” approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a proposition: If that “assertion” is accepted, then the score is updated accordingly. Little attention is paid to the question whether that proposition is put forth as a conjecture, guess, assertion, or supposition for the sake of argument. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would do just this. Accordingly Green 1999 attempts a synthesis of some aspects of this scorekeeping model, Gricean pragmatics, and concepts pertaining to speech acts.

Frege's Begriffschrift constitutes history's first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system. However, Frege did not see his Begriffschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from proposition already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator : an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth. (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege's idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson, however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise, arguing that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one's speech act, the only interest in a force indicator would be if it could guarantee the force of one's speech act. But nothing could: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of her performance:

It is easy to see that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion; every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Dummett 1993 and Hare 1989 reply to Davidson. Hare in particular remarks that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to the issue of illocutionary acts, which, as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P (though perhaps a convention could make it the case that people say I believe that P ), so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one's performing a speech act: Such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, ‘as is the case’ can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: ‘If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Greenland will melt.’ Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is committed to the content of the antecedent. If that claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the speech act rather than the proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among propositions. Since particulars cannot stand in inferential relations to one another, no such relations could obtain between individual speech acts. However, just as two events E 1 and E 2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S 1 and S 2 could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment . According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S 1 commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S 2 iff it is not possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 . Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S 1 is identical with <IP 1 , Str " , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 > (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S 2 is identical with <IP 1 , Str $ , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 >. Suppose further that Str " and Str $ differ only in that " is stronger than $. Then it will not be possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 ; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 implies a speech act S n .)

Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can also commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R , then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R . That is not to say that I have also asserted R : If assertion were closed under deduction I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q , then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q . For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q .

To explicate this relation, Searle and Vanderveken define weak illocutionary commitment: S 1 weakly illocutionarily implies S 2 iff every performance of S 1 commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S 2 (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q , and an agent asserts P , then she is committed to believing that Q . These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q . In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q ) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q .

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Let S be an arbitrary speaker, < ⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

<⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > is illocutionarily valid iff if speaker S is committed to each A i under mode ⊢ i , then S is committed to B under mode ⊢. [ 12 ]

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken's definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S 1 , …, S n -1 , which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act S n . Evidently such a “strict liability” conception still requires that one performs S n only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 ; it is difficult to see how one can perform S n while having no intention of performing a speech act at all.

We have also made progress on a question raised in Section 1, namely whether “speech act theory” deserves its name. An appropriate definition of illocutions would enable us to explain, rather than merely describe, some features of speech acts. Vanderveken 1990 offers a set of tableaux depicting inferential relations among speech acts. For instance, the following is a fragment of his tableaux for assertives–speech acts whose illocutionary point is to describe how things are:

castigate  reprimand  accuse  blame  criticize  assert  suggest

where strong illocutionary validity moves from left to right. This is because all these speech acts have the illocutionary point of describing how things are, but the propositional content conditions and degree of strength of illocutionary point conditions become increasingly less stringent as we move from left to right. Accounts of this sort offer hope of our being able informatively answer such questions whether someone who castigates an addressee for some state of affairs is also assertorically committed to the obtaining of that state of affairs. Might we discover “illocutionary tautologies”, “illocutionary absurdities” and other phenomena that could shed light on such utterances as “This very utterance is an assertion”, “I doubt this very claim”? Affirmative answers to such questions will be needed if we are to justify our use of “speech act theory”.

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• Stenius, E. (1967) ‘Mood and language-game’, Synthese 17 : 254-274.
• Strawson, P. (1950). ‘On referring’. Mind 59: 320-44.
• –––(1964) ‘Intention and convention in speech acts’, The Philosophical Review 73 : 439-60, reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers . London: Methuen, 1971.
• –––. (1970) Meaning and truth. Reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers . London: Methuen 1971.
• –––. (1973) ‘Austin and ‘locutionary meaning’’. In G.Warnock (ed), Essays on J. L. Austin , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 46–68.
• Thomason, R. (1990) ‘Accommodation, meaning and implicature: interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics’. In Cohen, Morgan and Pollock (eds.), Intentions in Communication . Cambridge, MA: MIT. 325-364.
• Tsohatzidis, S.L. (ed.) (1994) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (Routledge)
• Vanderveken, D. (1990). Meaning and Speech Acts, Vols I and II (Cambridge).
• Vendler, Z. 1972: Res Cogitans (Cornell).
• Watson, G. 2004: ‘Asserting and Promising,’ Philosophical Studies 117 : 57-77
• Williamson, T. (1996). ‘Knowing and asserting.’ The Philosophical Review 105: 489-523.
• Dummett, M. Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard).
• Furberg, M. 1971. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J. L. Austin's Philosophy . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Grewendorf, G. and G. Meggle (eds.) 2002: Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality (Dordrecht: Kluwer).
• Holdcroft, D. 1978. Words and Deeds: Problems in the Theory of Speech Acts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Lepore, E. and van Gulick, R. (eds). 1991. John Searle and his Critics . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Warnock, G. Ed. 1973: Essays on J. L. Austin . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Warnock, G. 1989: J. L. Austin . New York: Routledge.
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• Working Papers in Lingustics , University College London.
• ‘ Toward a history of speech act theory ’, a paper by Barry Smith (SUNY/Buffalo).

anaphora | assertion | Frege, Gottlob | Grice, Paul | implicature | -->meaning, theories of --> | pragmatics | -->presupposition --> | propositional attitude reports | propositions | vagueness

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
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Article contents

Speech acts.

• Mitchell Green Mitchell Green Philosophy, University of Connecticut
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.200
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.

Recent theorizing about speech acts tends to fall either into conventionalist or intentionalist traditions: the former sees speech acts as analogous to moves in a game, with such acts being governed by rules of the form “doing A counts as doing B”; the latter eschews game-like rules and instead sees speech acts as governed by communicative intentions only. Debate also arises over the extent to which speakers can perform one speech act indirectly by performing another. Skeptics about the frequency of such events contend that many alleged indirect speech acts should be seen instead as expressions of attitudes. New developments in speech act theory also situate them in larger conversational frameworks, such as inquiries, debates, or deliberations made in the course of planning. In addition, recent scholarship has identified a type of oppression against under-represented groups as occurring through “silencing”: a speaker attempts to use a speech act to protect her autonomy, but the putative act fails due to her unjust milieu.

• performative
• illocutionary force
• communicative intentions
• perlocution
• felicity condition
• speaker meaning
• presupposition
• indirect speech act
• illocutionary silencing

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10 Speech Acts

Stephen C. Levinson is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is the author of over 270 publications on language and cognition, including the books Politeness (Cambridge University Press, 1987, with Penelope Brown), Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Presumptive Meanings(MIT Press, 2000), Space in language and cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and has edited the collections (with D. Wilkins) Grammars of space (Cambridge University Press), (with M. Bowerman) Language acquisition and conceptual development (Cambridge University Press), (with P. Jaisson) Culture and evolution (MIT Press), (with N. Enfield) Roots of sociality (Berg), (with P. Lee), new edition of Language, thought, and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (MIT Press). His current research is focused on the cognitive foundations for communication, and the relation of language to general cognition. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea and has received a 5–year ERC Advanced Grant in 2011.

• Published: 07 March 2016
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The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation.

10.1 Introduction

The concept of speech act is one of the most important notions in pragmatics. The term denotes the sense in which utterances are not mere meaning-bearers, but rather in a very real sense do things, that is, perform actions. This is clear from a number of simple observations:

utterances in conversation (and that is the only kind considered in this article) respond not to the shape or meaning of what was said, but to the underlying ‘point’ or action performed by the prior turn at talk, which might have been expressed in any number of ways;

utterances often have non-verbal counterparts (cf. waving to saying hello; bidding at auction by hand or voice);

utterances interdigitate with non-verbal actions in action sequences (cf. ordering a sandwich in a service encounter);

utterances have real-world consequences just like non-verbal actions (a $1,000 bid at an auction commits you to paying; saying you have nothing to declare in an airport can get you a big fine).

These actions are on a different ontological plane than the actions of the vocal organs in speech, which of course activate the motor cortex just as much as reaching for a glass—speech acts are more like moves in chess, whose meanings are circumscribed by rules and expectations. Trying to understand how utterances can have these abstract action-like properties, how they are coded linguistically, and how we recognize them are some of the core issues in this domain.

Despite the fact that speech acts are clearly central to an understanding of language use, they have been largely off the linguistics agenda since the 1980s. As is often the case in science, research on speech acts boomed for a little over a decade (in the 1970s and 1980s), and then went out of fashion without the most fundamental issues being resolved at all. Amongst these unanswered questions are: How many types are there, and are they universal or culturally specific? How are they expressed in language? And how are they recognized or attributed in actual language use? These questions are addressed in sections 10.3–10.9 below.

10.2 A Brief History of the Concepts Leading to the Current State of the Art

In philosophy of language during the 1930s and 1940s the picture theory of meaning, and the broader correspondence theory of truth, began to be challenged by theories of language use being developed by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin in Oxford. It is Austin who is usually credited with the first developed theory of speech acts, although his influential lectures ‘How to do things with words’ were not published until 1962 after his death ( Austin 1962a ). Austin took the view that philosophy of language had wrongly concentrated on statements, or even just propositions, and in doing so had lost track of what language is mostly used for. Rather, he claimed, utterances attempt to do things, and just like other actions can fail for a range of reasons. He catalogued the kinds of actions performed, by noting that most speech acts (however colloquially expressed) can be paraphrased in the normal form ‘I hereby V performative ’ where a delimited set of verbs like order, promise, warn, congratulate could appear. He also classified the reasons for success or failure of speech acts, dubbed ‘felicity conditions’, noting that they often require appropriate subjective states (later called ‘sincerity conditions’ by Searle) as well as appropriate circumstances (Searle’s ‘preparatory conditions’). In this sort of way all the reasons for my bid at Christie’s for a Picasso not succeeding (I am not a registered bidder, lack the funds, don’t succeed in getting the attention of the auctioneer, etc.) can be spelled out. Speech acts can be understood on the analogy of ceremonies, like marriage or toasting the monarch’s health—in the same sort of way they are conventional arrangements for creating new states of affairs, and consequently are in principle open-ended in kind. Austin went on to notice that these success conditions not only parallel truth conditions, but actually subsume them; statements are therefore just a special class of speech acts with sincerity conditions of belief and presuppositions or preparatory conditions that must also be met. He also went to some pains to clarify all the different senses in which actions could be said to be performed by utterances: the ‘locutionary act’ is the saying of the words with the intended meanings, the ‘illocutionary act (or force)’ is the speech act proper (ordering, advising, warning, etc.), and the ‘perlocutionary act’ is the further act or consequences that are context-specific and not part of the specific conventions invoked (e.g. by asking your advice I might flatter you). Austin also developed a number of notions whose importance was not immediately realized—for example, the concept of ‘uptake’ (the ratified receipt and recognition by a recipient).

Austin’s work was influentially systematized by John Searle (1969) , who connected the theory to sociology and jurisprudence on the one hand (speech acts are built as constitutive rules, whereby doing X counts as constituting a new state of affairs, like scoring a goal, or being guilty of a specific crime), and to linguistics on the other hand. Noting, following Hare (1952) , that the same propositional content could occur across speech acts (as in ‘Pass the exam’, ‘Did you pass the exam?’, ‘Good luck with the exam’), he added a ‘propositional content condition’, so that the felicity conditions together now effectively defined the speech act. He went on to suggest that an exhaustive typology of speech acts could be arrived at by clustering types of felicity conditions, so that there can be seen to be just five main types: representatives (statements and the like), directives (questions, requests, orders), commissives (threats, promises, offers), expressives (thanking, apologizing, congratulating, etc.), and declarations (like christening, declaring war, firing, etc. which rely on elaborate institutional backgrounds). Searle’s theory was well articulated and proved attractive to linguists, as recounted below.

Meanwhile, other philosophers took a more psychological view of language use, chief among them Grice and Strawson, who both thought that speech acts should be thought about as specific classes of intention, e.g. intentions to cause beliefs in addressees, or intentions to get them to do things. Grice ( 1957 , 1975 ) reconstructed the notion of meaning along these lines, and characterized the use of language in conversation as guided by rational action between partners. Although he never laid this out in print, it is clear that he thought that felicity conditions simply follow from the specific classes of intention: if I want to get you to pass the water by saying ‘Could you pass the water?’, it would simply be irrational if I didn’t want the water, if the water is not in your reach, if you are deaf or otherwise preoccupied. This intentional perspective was followed up by work in natural-language processing that related speech act recognition to plan recognition (see section 10.7 ).

During the period of generative semantics, linguists became increasingly interested in language usage and how sentences might encode aspects of the contexts in which they are used. Searle and other theorists had not concentrated on the actualities of speech act coding, presuming instead that illocutionary force is coded in the major sentence types (imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives) and in the explicit performative verbs when so used—these would be the ‘literal illocutionary forces’ of utterances. But as any practical grammarian of English or other languages knows, in fact one has to learn idiomatic means of expressing speech acts. Gordon and Lakoff (1971) noted for the first time that ‘indirect speech acts’ could also routinely be expressed by querying or stating a felicity condition: ‘Do you need that pencil?’, ‘Could I have that pencil’, ‘Is that your pencil?’, ‘I’d like that pencil’ all query or state a precondition on requesting. They also noted that adverbials like please or frankly might force a particular speech act reading (as in ‘Please could we begin on time?’). There followed a large literature on indirect speech acts, investigating the forms used especially for requests across cultures, the psychological processing (indirect speech acts seemed to be processed without any complex detour through a literal meaning), and the politeness reasons for the mismatch between direct and indirect speech act coding. By the end of the 1980s, however, linguistic interests had moved largely elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a completely different approach, unrelated to the linguistic and philosophical traditions, was being taken in sociology, where the empirical study of conversation was being born in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unencumbered by theory, the conversation analysts (Harvey Sacks, Manny Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson especially) were observing all sorts of fundamental organizations for interactive language use: turn-taking, repair, and sequence organization (see e.g. Schegloff and Sacks 1973 , Schegloff 2007a , and this volume ). In doing so, they were finding speech acts that had no vernacular names, no associated performative verbs or (it seems) special markings, for example pre-closings (e.g. the exchange of well s before goodbyes in phone calls), assessments (evaluations of shared events or things), repair initiators (like excuse me? ), pre-invitations ( What are you doing on Friday night? ), and so forth. Such actions (as the conversational analysts call them, treated here as equivalent to the notion of speech act) can only be understood against the background of sequential position—that is, where they come with relation to prior or following turns. Despite the fact that many observations have now accrued about the sets of actions and their sequential placement, little systematic theory about actions has emerged from this work (for a survey see Levinson 2013a ; Drew 2013 ).

Although this brief review cannot do justice to the extensive work that has been done in the different disciplines interested in speech acts (linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis) (see Levinson 1983 , 2013a ), it serves as a pointer to the state of the art. There is general acceptance of the importance of the subject, but little recent research that advances our understanding of the fundamental questions.

10.3 The Essential Insight and the Leading Issues

In contrast to the emphasis in modern linguistics on language as a device for an endless sound–meaning correspondence, J. L. Austin’s core insight was that the central function of language is not to deliver meanings but to deliver speech acts. For the core ecological niche for language, and still its primary use and the locus of its acquisition, is conversation. Each of us produces on average perhaps 16 000 words and 1200 turns at talk a day—and each turn delivers a speech act: all in all we are participating in exchanges with something like 5000 speech act moves a day. In order to respond on time (within the c .200 ms allowed by the turn-taking system; Stivers et al. 2009 ) we need to decode or attribute speech acts at lightning speed, because it is the illocutionary force, not the meaning, that we primarily respond to. One of the central puzzles is that speech acts are not for the most part simply or directly coded in the linguistic form: for example, Where are you going? could be an idle question, or a challenge, or a reprimand, or a prelude (a pre-) to a request for a ride or to an offer to give you a ride, and the relevant response depends on the correct attribution. How then are speech acts recognized in the tight time-frame allowed? Is there a finite list of possible action types, or can they be created de novo ? Further, as just illustrated, an utterance or turn can perform more than one action simultaneously: in asking a question ( Where are you going? ) the speaker could also be transparently performing a pre-request in such a way that the addressee can make an offer in next turn ( Downtown, would you like a ride? ). How many acts can be performed at once?

These then are the central puzzles in this area, to be taken up below. Faced with these difficulties, to which current research yields no definitive answers, it is tempting for linguistic theory to simply hand over the can of worms to some other discipline (conversation analysis, for example) as e.g. Bierwisch (1980) recommended. However, as discussed in section 10.8 , there is a substantial intersection of speech acts and linguistic structure, which makes the topic of central importance for e.g. the study of syntax. Usage and structure in fact go hand in hand.

10.4 The Nature of the Beast: Identifying Speech Acts

In this section we consider the problem of identifying and cataloguing speech acts, given some problematic properties, like their implicit character and non-one-to-one mapping onto utterances.

There are four (three basic and one related) approaches to identifying or characterizing speech acts. First, one could rely on natural metalanguage, as in English offer, request, invitation, greeting , and so on. Austin’s own tack here, recollect, was to do the lexicography of performative verbs ( I hereby declare/choose/delegate/promise/undertake/bequeath … ). But there are many reasons to distrust natural metalanguage. Many speech acts have no vernacular names (such actions as pre-invitations, continuers, repair initiators, and the like), as discovered by the conversational analysts. In addition, while written languages often have large metalanguage resources of this kind, unwritten ones often do not, and they may have speech acts alien to us. So natural language terms are a poor guide.

A second approach is the use of felicity conditions to characterize speech acts, as in classical speech act theory. A problem here is that taken as necessary conditions jointly sufficient to define speech acts, it is hard to specify them right. Thus the conditions for genuine information-seeking questions, exam questions, questions checking facts, and questions used in repair will all be subtly different—they form a loose family of speech act types not easily captured by a definitive checklist of conditions.

A third approach favoured by conversation analysts is to use the character of responses to identify prior actions. For example, if a range of utterances X–Y–Z are all immediately responded to by fellow interactants passing the speaker something, then prima facie X–Y–Z are requests. The observation is that many speech acts come in pairs (‘adjacency pairs’), with an initiating action having a characteristic response, as in greetings followed by greetings, offers by acceptances (or declinings), questions by answers, and so forth ( Schegloff 2007a ; Stivers 2013 ). Thus if one can independently characterize the responding action, one can type the eliciting action. Conversation analysts argue that this is how we check that we are understood—we expect a response of a certain type. Consider, the following example, where the response marked by thanks and excuses suggests that for B , A’s turn appears to have been an offer, though that is not obvious from its structure or content:

A fourth, related approach is to appreciate that an utterance gets parts of its identity from the sequential position it occupies. Consider the following tokens of the utterance Okay , each doing entirely different things (labelled here with the action codings used in conversation analysis—see Schegloff 2007a ):

One aspect of speech acts thus highlighted is that they are necessarily interactional in character. Consider a proposal (say about going for a walk together)—for success, the action depends on the uptake: it takes two to tango. This is a fundamental aspect of speech acts neglected in Searlian analysis—almost all speech acts are joint actions ( Clark 1996 ). 1

Most analysis actually makes use of all four of these different kinds of identifying properties, trading on our vernacular terminology, trying to tighten it up by defining criteria, considering how participants themselves respond to utterances, and noting how utterances play different roles depending on their positioning vis-à-vis other speech acts.

10.5 The Inventory and its Universality

A natural question is how many kinds of speech acts are there? The question presumes a level of abstraction away from the specific propositional content, which may of course be unique: it’s a question about how many types of illocutionary force exist. Austin suggested an open-ended list, convention-based, so cultural in nature. In contrast Grice (in unpublished work: Grice 1973 ; see also Schiffer 1972 ) had suggested that complex speech act types could be built up from the two propositional attitudes of wanting and judging. His target was the ‘moods’ expressed in the major sentence types, namely declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives. Most languages grammatically code at least two of these, which could be taken as a hint of a cross-cultural core of basic speech acts. However it is moot whether these forms really code speech acts since they are in practice used for diverse action types, while other minor sentence types like English expressives more directly code for force (see section 10.6 ). But the idea that speech acts fall into classes of intention is persistent (see e.g. Tomasello 2008 ).

Searle, taking an intermediate position, has argued that there are in fact just five large classes of things one can do with language—five major speech act types. The classification uses three parameters: the ‘essential conditions’ (Searle’s term for the intentional goal), the sincerity conditions, and ‘direction of fit’ (whether the words copy the world as in statements or the world copies the words as in promises). Searle’s classes are representatives (assertion-like), directives (questioning, requesting, etc.), commissives (promising, threatening, offering), expressives (thanking, apologizing, etc.), and declarations (blessing, christening, etc., which rely on special institutional backgrounds).

Searle’s classification cannot however be exhaustive. First it fails to accommodate many of the actions noted by the conversation analysts (e.g. the continuer hmhm , the pre-s, the repair initiators and the repair responses, and so forth). Second, it is culture-bound. Consider the following exchange simplified and in translation from the language Yélî Dnye ( Levinson 2005 ):

This is an adjacency pair of a special kind peculiar to this matrilineal Papuan culture, in which men make jokes by alluding to some unfortunate accident or event that befell the other man’s father-in-law, to which the response must be immediate and in kind (B’s father-in-law killed his wife and then himself with a bush-knife, while A’s father-in-law died falling from a mangrove tree; they are ostensibly commenting on a man yelling down a megaphone). These utterances are paired father-in-law jokes and they don’t describe states of affairs or express the feelings of the speakers or otherwise fall within Searle’s taxonomy. In addition, Searle’s classification is of course a higher-order grouping of types, so it will not help us understand the specifics of action and response in conversation.

Austin or Searle’s armchair classifications are based on intuitions about salient types of speech acts. These are nearly always first parts of (base) adjacency pairs (see Schegloff 2007a , this volume )—that is, the initiating actions (like questions, offers, invitations) to which responses are due (even then, many such initiatory actions have proved relatively unavailable to intuition, like repair initiators, continuers, assessments, and the like). But the actions that lead in to these initiators (e.g. pre-announcements, pre-closings) or the responses themselves (e.g. answers, agreements, continuers, counter-offers), or the actions that interpose between first part and second (e.g. clarification questions) escape proper treatment in classical speech act theory. Consider (with arrowed action labelling):

Describing line (1) as a question would miss its basic function, namely to check whether a news announcement should be made; line (2) makes clear it should (note the what ); line (3) sets up the topic of the announcement in such a way than no announcement proves necessary, for the recipient guesses in line (4). Thus although (1) and (2) could be said to be questions that is not their main function, which is as preliminaries to an announcement (see Levinson 1983 : 345–364; and Schegloff 2007a for more on pre-s). Recollect as mentioned above that conversation analysts have emphasized that it is the character of the response, or the locus in a sequence, that plays a major role in giving speech acts their identities.

To return to the central questions of this section: Is there a finite set of speech act types, and if so how big is it? The answers are that we really don’t know. Is the set universal in character? Not in the sense that all speech acts are pan-cultural (witness Yélî Dnye father-in-law jokes, or any of the institutionally circumscribed acts like finding guilty, proposing toasts, declaring war, etc.), but it is an open question as to whether there is a pan-cultural core with such plausibly general functions as telling, questioning, requesting, greeting, agreeing, or initiating repair.

10.6 The Multiple Action Problem

One particularly troubling feature of the mapping of speech acts onto utterances is that such a mapping is not necessarily, or even mostly, 1:1. Sometimes turns at talk have more than one constructional component, and each part can perform an action, as in the previous example (4) above and in (5):

But often a single constructional unit (whether or not it exhausts the turn) can do more than one action (as in (4) where Didju hear the terrible news? might be said to be a question, but carries with it the obligation to tell the news, conditional on the answer ‘no’). Consider the following example from a verbal tussle between a mother and her 14-year-old daughter Virginia wanting more allowance or pocket money:

Viriginia’s proposal is responded to by a question-like response, which has the form of an other-initiator of repair or OIR (i.e. is initiated by the responder, seeking repair on the prior turn). But it is a prosodically incredulous OIR, adumbrating an upcoming challenge (call it a pre-challenge), which after a go-ahead, is duly delivered ( Just to throw away? ) but again in the form of a question inviting repair. That extreme formulation of the question in turn prefigures a rejection (call the turn then a pre-rejection), and gets a defence. And so forth. But now notice we have multiple layers of function for each turn—up to four actions packed into the one subclausal turn in Just to throw away !

The question that arises is whether there is any limit to the number of actions that a single turn can bear. Notice that some of these might merely be a matter of granularity of description, e.g. a special kind of question is often used to ask for repair. But that is not the kind of relation between the question and, say, the challenge: notice how the response deals with both. The literature acknowledges the existence of turns performing two actions: on one account, a ‘literal speech act’ is used to deliver an ‘indirect speech act’ ( Searle 1975 ), and conversation analysts talk about one action being the vehicle for one other action ( Schegloff 2007a ). But there is no explanation for turns that perform three or more actions (see, however, the suggestions in terms of plan reconstruction at the end of the next section).

10.7 Bottom-Up and Top-Down Inference in Speech Act Recognition and Attribution

Speech acts, it has been suggested, are not easy to individuate or identify, are not known to come from a finite or universal set, and can be laminated one on top of another. These are problematic properties. But an even greater problem is how they are recognized (more properly attributed 2 ) under the extraordinary time pressures of spoken conversation (or any other interactional use of language). Here we concentrate on the comprehension problem. As already mentioned, on average across languages the gaps between turns are on the order of 200–300 ms ( Stivers et al. 2009 ; Levinson and Torreira 2015 ). Given that the fastest response from conception to word takes 600 + ms ( Levelt 1989 ; responses of any complexity, e.g. three or more words, take 900–1500 ms or more to prepare), it is clear that speakers in conversation predict the end of the incoming turn in order to launch their own response on time. But that response must ‘type’ the incoming turn, as e.g. a question, request, statement, before it has finished in order to compose the relevant response and launch it so it comes out on time. Probably this is done on average about halfway through the incoming turn (see Magyari et al. 2014 ).

This makes the speed at which speech acts are attributed appear quite miraculous. For, as already made clear, the coding of speech acts is for the most part not directly marked: most syntactic forms, even whole constructions like Why don’t you … , are multi-duty ( why don’t you turns out to code proposals, advice, invitations, and complaints, while Do you want codes requests, invitations, offers, and so forth; Couper-Kuhlen 2010 ).

Speech act recognition is similar to any perception problem, where pattern has to be discerned and categorized out of noise. Both ‘bottom-up’ information (in the signal) and ‘top-down’ information (expected categories) are usually involved, and the noisier the channel the greater the role for ‘top-down’ factors. Let us consider them in turn. Bottom-up information is whatever clues to speech act type can be found directly coded or cued in the signal, by lexical choice, construction, or prosody. Given the turn-taking facts, it is clear that signals early on in a turn are going to be more important than signals at the end of turns, since by then the choice of response must have already been made. This suggests that effective cues will be ‘front-loaded’, coming early in the turn (see Levinson 2013a ). Here the cross-linguistic facts are curious. Take the grammar of interrogatives, associated (though not exclusively) with the illocutionary force of questioning. First, wh - or content interrogatives are only grammatically initial in about one third of languages ( Dryer 2011b ); however, this is the dominant single strategy since the alternative positions are various, and Dryer notes that only ‘a few languages exhibit at least a weak tendency to place interrogative phrases at the end of sentences’ (he mentions two out of a sample of 900 languages). These facts are in line with the ‘front-loading’ prediction from the psycholinguistic facts, but only as a tendency. The prediction would be that languages with late (right-located) wh - words would have developed compensatory cues like prosody or particles positioned earlier in the clause.

Second, take polar (yes/no) questions ( Dryer 2011a ). The commonest coding strategy (60 per cent of languages) is by particle, and of these about 30 per cent are in initial or second position; however the commonest position of particles is final (50 per cent of all particle types). It is worth noting, however, that 30 per cent of languages have no lexical or morphosyntactic coding at all for polar questions, relying solely on intonation or prosody. These facts do not seem to be in line with the ‘front-loading’ expectation. Further light is thrown on these issues by studies of usage in corpora. In a study of ten languages, we found that those sentence-final particles are omitted or absent 40 per cent of the time in Lao and 70 per cent in Korean ( Enfield et al. 2010 ); two of the languages lacked any coding (including prosodic); and morphosyntactic coding as in English inversion is also mostly omitted. One can conclude that polar-question marking must carry low functional load, wherever it is located. These usage studies also showed that interrogatives (whether content or polar) only perform the function of seeking new information about 30 per cent of the time; around 40 per cent of them are involved in repair or checking or confirming just-given information, and the remaining 30 per cent perform many different functions, including offers, requests, and so on.

To summarize so far: there is no one-to-one match of form to function. Even where apparently dedicated morphosyntactic machinery exists to code speech acts (as in interrogatives), the coding may be omitted: about 60–70 per cent (in various corpora) of English polar questions are unmarked declaratives in form, and do not carry rising intonation ( Geluykens 1988 ). Cross-linguistically, the tendency is for two thirds or more of all questions (in a broad sense) to be polar questions (unpublished data from Stivers et al. 2009 ). Even though wh - or content questions would seem to require a wh -form, this is not necessarily true; many languages have indefinite quantifiers that double as interrogative words, and many allow gaps to code the variable (as in John is going to _? instead of Where is John going? ).

There are then distinct limits to the bottom-up coding and inference of speech act force. Nevertheless, some detailed studies suggest that underlying the apparent many-to-many correspondences between utterance forms and speech acts there might be a clockwork system. For example, in a study of requests in English telephone calls, it was found that the Can you/Could you/Would you … forms are used for requests where the speaker has clear rights or entitlements and knows what the request would involve; where the entitlements are low and the contingencies involved less clear, the I wonder if form is preferred ( Drew and Curl 2008 ). This suggests that where multiple forms are available, they may each carry subtly different presuppositions about background conditions.

Nevertheless, it is more likely that the cues to illocutionary force are multiple and probabilistic in character. Indeed, there is now considerable work in natural-language processing (NLP) that seems to show this. This work takes speech corpora, usually from task-oriented dialogues, and tags them by hand with a very constrained set of speech act categories that seem to reflect the functions in each particular corpus. Machine-learning algorithms are then trained on a subcorpus, inducing the association between surface cues—lexical items, phrases, or intonation—and the pre-coded tags. The algorithm is then let loose on the rest of the corpus to see how well it emulates the human tagging. So, for example, it was found that ‘assessments’ (value judgements like ‘That was great’ that usually call for a response in kind) have quite restricted elements ( Goodwin 1996 ): that as subject in 80 per cent of cases, intensifiers really or pretty , and adjectives drawn from a short list including great, good, nice, wonderful … etc. ( Jurafsky 2004 ). So a combination (an unstructured list) of surface cues may be a crude but very effective trigger for speech act categorization: the chances of being an assessment given just one cue like really might be low, but in combination with that and great may be greatly increased. This would be just the kind of low-level associative process that could rapidly deliver probabilities of speech act assignment in comprehension, and since these cues are distributed throughout the turn, an incoming turn could be incrementally classified with increasing certainty.

Turning to top-down information, this includes all the accumulated contextual and sequential information that forms the niche for the incoming turn. For example, in service encounters, the goals for speaker and addressee will be largely pre-set, so that an utterance like Do you have coffee to go? can be understood directly as a request. In free conversation, though, the context is usually more local. One factor of constant relevance is the current state of the common ground between participants. We noted earlier that polar questions in English and many other languages are typically unmarked, and thus have the shape and often the prosody of declaratives. How then can they be understood as questions? As Labov and Fanshel (1977) pointed out, the recognition is done on the basis of knowledge asymmetry: thus You’re hungry is likely to be understood as a question, while You’re smart is likely to be interpreted as a compliment. Statements about what the other knows best are candidate questions, and this explains how a fifth of languages can do without any lexical or morphosyntactic marking of polar questions (prosody may often help of course, but in some languages it seems never to play this role; see e.g. Levinson (2010) on Yélî Dnye or Dryer (2011a) on Chalcatongo Mixtec). Epistemic asymmetry or symmetry is such a strong indicator that it can overrule interrogative marking: thus Isn’t it a beautiful day is not likely to be interpreted as a question, since we can all be presumed to have access to the weather. Heritage (2012) argues that epistemic status trumps question marking in all cases.

A second always relevant factor is sequential location in the sequence of turns. The power of sequential location to map illocutionary force onto utterances can be appreciated from a number of angles. Consider as a limiting case silence, where there is literally no signal, yet the silence can imply a response, as in the following example where the two-second silence is taken to imply ‘no’ and functions to block a forthcoming request:

The inference relies on the ‘conditional relevance’ of a second pair part and on the principle that dispreferred responses are typically delayed or mitigated. Another way to appreciate the power of sequence to attribute speech act force is to consider cases where ambiguities arise, as in the following example (8) where the arrowed turn is ambiguous ( Schegloff 1988 ). It could be a straight question, or it could be a pre-announcement—that is, an offer to tell conditional on the recipient indicating that he doesn’t know the indicated news. Note that the question force is not the ‘literal force’ (a question about knowledge), but a question about who is going. Pre-announcements often have this form (cf. Do you know the joke about the plumber? ) and the pre-announcement reading is encouraged by the context, where Russ had produced a pre-announcement just before in the first line, and Mom could be reciprocating in kind. The ambiguity comes about because both readings are salient in the context.

A related type of high-level information can also be brought to bear on the interpretation of a turn, namely an assessment of how the turn fits into the likely goal structure or plan of the speaker. For this is the inference schema we use to understand any sequence of actions: if you are sitting opposite and grasp your mug and lift it up, I’ll expect you to put it to your mouth and take a drink. The sub-actions I see (grasping the mug, lifting it) are preconditions to the action I infer (taking a sip), and seeing the initial parts I can make the metonymic inference to the whole. Interestingly, the same pattern of inference works for speech acts. Consider the following service encounter in example (9), where a precondition to buying pecan Danish pastries is queried, and the seller responds both to the question and the underlying request.

Notice however that no request has been issued, so how exactly does this work? Consider the analysis sketched in (10), in terms of customer C’s plans and the seller S’s reconstruction of them from the first utterance in the sequence. From Do you have pecan Danish today the seller can infer that this is a precondition on asking for some, therefore the request is likely to follow—given which the seller can truncate the sequence as she does, by responding to the foreseeable forthcoming request (in the dotted box in the figure in (10)). It is this projected request that gives Do you have pecan Danish today its pre-request flavour; in this way speech acts can acquire multiple actions mapped onto one turn by virtue of projectable next actions.

Notice this account explains why mentioning a felicity condition on a speech act is one way of performing that speech act (this is the classical theory of ‘indirect speech acts’, as in Searle 1975 ). But it has much wider application. Consider the telephone exchange in (11): the caller C in line 3 queries what the recipient is doing, which is a potential prequel to an invitation. The response in line 4 not only answers the query but at the same makes clear that there is no impediment to an invitation, thus projecting an acceptance. The lamination of actions throughout this sequence is straightforwardly explicable in terms of current action plus foreseeable next action, as sketched in the figure in (12).

The virtues of this mode of analysis become especially clear when one considers cases like the following where the main actions are projected, but never actually performed.

Here there is no feasible ‘indirect speech act’ in terms of classical felicity conditions: there is rather an indication of a predicament which would have an obvious solution, while the recipient produces an account for why the obvious solution cannot be performed. In the same sort of way, in example (6), Mom’s Just to throw away? performs four actions, as question, repair initiator, challenge, and pre-rejection because it is transparent that Mom intends to resist Virginia’s claim for more weekly pocket money by countering Virginia’s every move. Neither indirect speech act theory nor the conversation analyst’s notion of one action being the ‘vehicle’ for another (as in Schegloff 2007a ) can explain this kind of quadruple depth of speech act lamination on a single turn.

Plan reconstruction as an account of speech act comprehension was first advanced by Allen (1979) and Cohen and Perrault (1979) and applied to the problem of indirect speech acts by Allen and Perrault (1980) (see also Clark 1979 , Levinson 1981 ). These approaches in classical Artificial Intelligence style make use of the heavily intentional approach favoured by Grice and reviewed in section 10.1 , cranking through a calculus of desire and belief to arrive at a final ‘indirect speech act’ ( Cohen et al. 1990 ). The insights can be understood, however, in a slightly different way, in terms of an utterance being designed to reveal, variously, the whole or part of the iceberg of underlying interactional goals, where projectable next turns serve to laminate one or more ‘indirect speech acts’ onto the current turn.

Both bottom-up cues, which may be just probabilistic associations of linguistic features and speech acts, together with top-down factors like the role of sequence, epistemic asymmetries, and plan attribution, almost certainly play a role together in speech act comprehension. Curiously, cases where interlocutors misunderstand one another as in (8) are vanishingly rare. But there is no complete model of how these various kinds of information come together in action attribution.

10.8 Syntax, Sentence Types, and the Grammar of Speech Acts

We return now to the grammar of speech acts. We’ve noted that in general there is no one-to-one mapping between form and function. This is especially true of the ‘big three’ sentence types, declarative, interrogative, and imperative, which are probably best seen as carrying a very general semantics (e.g. a wh- interrogative expresses an open proposition with a blank constituent, which is why the same form may double as an indefinite expression in many languages). However, as discussed above under the rubric of cues, there can be many surface elements that will help to narrow down an illocutionary force. There are for example adverbs like please that unambiguously mark requests or pleadings, adverbs like obviously or frankly that mark statements ( Gordon and Lakoff 1971 ), and interjections like Wow, My God that mark exclamations. In addition there are minor sentence types that are indeed specialized for illocutionary force ( Sadock and Zwicky 1985 ). A classic case are exclamatives, where English has rich specialized constructional resources as in What a beautiful day!, That it should come to this!, Why, if it isn’t the trouble maker!, You and your linguistics!, Of all the stupid things to do!, To think I nearly won a medal! (well described in grammars like Quirk et al. 1989 ). Exclamatives are a category of some typological interest (see Michaelis 2001 , who defines them semantically and finds them often coded in quasi-interrogative or topic constructions or NP complements). Similarly, English codes wishes as optatives ( If only I’d done it, May the best man win, Oh to be in England ), and suggestions or proposals in special forms ( How about joining us?, What if you came earlier?, Let’s go, Why not have a drink? ). Many other languages have their own specialized forms for warnings, blessings, and the like. Unfortunately, studies of the usages of these forms are still few and far between, so we cannot be sure they are as specialized in usage as the grammars suggest—but it is an important subject for future research.

10.9 Conclusions—The Centrality of Speech Acts

The central function of language, it has been argued, is to deliver speech acts ( Searle 1972 ). The rest of the linguistic apparatus, with all of its complex syntax and propositional structure, is there to serve this purpose. For speech acts are the coin of conversation, and conversation the core niche for language use and acquisition. A retort might be that the central function of missiles is to target explosives, but this doesn’t help one understand much about the inner complex engineering of a missile—the outer function can be remote from design details, partly because there may be innumerable different engineering solutions that would answer the same function. Linguistics then would be effectively autonomous from the study of speech acts. What has been argued here, however, is that such a disjunction is unlikely to be tenable. First, language design has to accommodate to the tight constraints of conversation, so that speech acts have to be decoded early partly from bottom-up aspects of the signal—hence constructions of many different kinds serve this purpose, if often in a non-deterministic way. Second, the very clausal structure of language is almost certainly due to the tight turn constraints into which sentences must fit, where each turn must deliver at least one speech act. Third, whatever one’s views on the origin of language, short turns delivering speech acts were almost certainly a design feature of protolanguage—languages have evolved within this ecological niche, spinning complexity in the tight confines of the turn.

Another way to appreciate the centrality of speech acts in language design is to appreciate how many of the features we think of as most intimately connected to language structure are actually also exhibited in the sequential organization of speech acts. Consider recursion, argued by Chomsky ( 2007 , 2010 ) to be the most central design feature exclusive to language. Now consider that the clearest type of recursion, namely centre-embedding, is restricted in language to just two, occasionally three, levels of nesting. Karlsson (2007) found no examples of triple embedding in huge corpora, and just 13 in the whole history of Western literature; for spoken language, the limit is two. Since small numbers of centre-embeddings can easily be modelled with a finite state device, there is poor evidence for the need for phrase structure grammars here. Yet centre-embedding within discourse shows none of these limits, and is sufficiently multiple and routine to provide a much better basis for escalation to phrase structure grammars. Here is a simple example of one-degree centre-embedding:

Since this can be recursively elaborated, we could express the indefinite recursion by the rule: Q&A →Q (Q&A) A (Levinson 1981 , 2006 ; Koschmann 2010 ). The following shows an example with degree-three internal embedding (each level numbered), a level exceeding all syntactic embedding in spoken languages (the speech acts, or adjacency pairs, here relevant are request + compliance, question + answer, and two repair initiator + repairs).

It is easy to show that degree-six or more centre-embedding occurs in spoken dialogue (see Levinson 2013b ). When one finds a domain where a capacity is more evolved than in another domain, there is reason to assume that it has a longer evolutionary history. While short-term memory constraints are often invoked to explain our failure to produce centre-embedding in syntax, these do not seem to be a constraint in the interactive domain. This would suggest that linguistic recursion at least partly originates from this type of push-down stack in action sequencing, which as far as we know is universal in dialogue. Incidentally, it is also possible to show that cross-serial dependencies can be found in the sequential structure of speech acts, showing once again that complexity attributed to syntax may be more easily found in dialogue structure. All in all, a better case can be made for the need to climb the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars based on speech acts in dialogue than on syntactic structure.

For all the reasons outlined in this article, speech acts are a fundamentally important area of study in the language sciences. Work in this domain has been relatively, and inexplicably, neglected since the 1970s and 1980s, and it is time for a renaissance of work on speech acts and their use in dialogue. 3

A possible exception are ‘outlouds’ or ‘response cries’ like private exclamations ( Goffman 1978 ), which may be produced with or without an audience, but by definition without an addressee.

‘Recognition’ presupposes correct attribution that matches speaker intent, but since we are interested in the comprehension process which will include occasional misattributions, ‘attribution’ is the more accurate term.

My thanks to Penelope Brown and Kobin Kendrick for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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10.3: Indirect speech acts

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• Page ID 138677

• Paul Kroeger
• Dallas International University via Language Library Press

The Nigerian professor Ozidi Bariki describes a conversation in which he said to a friend:

“I love your left hand.” (The friend had a cup of tea in his hand). The friend, in reaction to my utterance, transferred the cup to his right hand. That prompted me to say: “I love your right hand”. My friend smiled, recognized my desire for tea and told his sister, “My friend wants tea”… My friend’s utterance addressed to his sister in reaction to mine was a representative, i.e. a simple statement: “my friend wants a tea”. The girl rightly interpreted the context of the representative to mean a directive. In other words, her brother (my friend) was ordering her to prepare some tea. (Bariki 2008)

This brief dialogue contains two examples of indirect speech acts. In both cases, the utterance has the form of a simple statement, but is actually intended to perform a different kind of act: request in the first case and command in the second. The second statement, “My friend wants tea,” was immediately and automatically interpreted correctly by the addressee. (In African culture, when an older brother makes such a statement to his younger sister, there is only one possible interpretation.) The first statement, however, failed to communicate. Only after the second attempt was the addressee able to work out the intended meaning, not automatically at all, but as if he was trying to solve a riddle.

Bariki uses this example to illustrate the role that context plays in enabling the hearer to identify the intended speech act. But it also shows us that context alone is not enough. In the context of the first utterance, there was a natural association between what was said ( your left hand ) and what was intended (a cup of tea); the addressee was holding a cup of tea in his left hand. In spite of this, the addressee was unable to figure out what the speaker meant. The contrast between this failed attempt at communication and the immediately understood statement My friend wants tea , suggests that there are certain principles and conventions which need to be followed in order to make the illocutionary force of an utterance clear to the hearer.

We might define an indirect speech act (following Searle 1975) as an utterance in which one illocutionary act (the primary act) is intentionally performed by means of the performance of another act (the literal act). In other words, it is an utterance whose form does not reflect the intended illocutionary force. My friend wants tea is a simple declarative sentence, the form which is normally used for making statements. In the context above, however, it was correctly interpreted as a command. So the literal act was a statement, but the primary act was a command.

Most if not all languages have grammatical and/or phonological means of distinguishing at least three basic types of sentences: statements, questions, and commands. The default expectation is that declarative sentences will express statements, interrogative sentences will express questions, and imperative sentences will express commands. When these expectations are met, we have a direct speech act because the grammatical form matches the intended illocutionary force. Explicit performatives are also direct speech acts.

An indirect speech act will normally be expressed as a declarative, interrogative, or imperative sentence; so the literal act will normally be a statement, question, or command. One of the best-known types of indirect speech act is the Rhetorical Question, which involves an interrogative sentence but is not intended to be a genuine request for information.

Why is the statement I love your left hand not likely to work as an indirect request for tea? Searle (1969; 1975) proposes that in order for an indirect speech act to be successful, the literal act should normally be related to the Felicity Conditions of the intended or primary act in certain specific ways. Searle restated Austin’s Felicity Conditions under four headings: preparatory conditions(background circumstances and knowledge about the speaker, hearer, and/ or situation which must be true in order for the speech act to be felicitous); sincerity conditions (necessary psychological states of speaker and/or hearer); propositional content (the kind of situation or event described by the underlying proposition); essential condition (the essence of the speech act; what the act “counts as”). These four categories are illustrated in Table 10.1 using the speech acts of promising and requesting.

Generally speaking, speakers perform an indirect speech act by stating or asking about one of the Felicity Conditions (apart from the essential condition). The examples in (7) show some sentences that could be used as indirect requests for tea. Sentences (7a–b) ask about the preparatory condition for a request, namely the hearer’s ability to perform the action. Sentences (7c–d) state the sincerity condition for a request, namely that the speaker wants the hearer to perform the action. Sentences (7e–f) ask about the propositional content of the request, namely the future act by the hearer.

(7) a. Do you have any tea?

b. Could you possibly give me some tea?

c. I would like you to give me some tea.

d. I would really appreciate a cup of tea.

e. Will you give me some tea?

f. Are you going to give me some tea?

All of these sentences could be understood as requests for tea, if spoken in the right context, but they are clearly not all equivalent: (7b) is a more polite way of asking than (7a); (7d) is a polite request, whereas (7c) sounds more demanding; (7e) is a polite request, whereas (7f) sounds impatient and even rude.

Not every possible strategy is actually available for a given speech act. For example, asking about the sincerity condition for a request is generally quite unnatural: # Do I want you to give me some tea ? This is because speakers do not normally ask other people about their own mental or emotional states. So that specific strategy cannot be used to form an indirect request.

We almost automatically interpret examples like (7b) and (7e) as requests. This tendency is so strong that it may be hard to recognize them as indirect speech acts. The crucial point is that their grammatical form is that of a question, not a request. However, some very close paraphrases of these sentences, such as those in (8), would probably not be understood as requests in most contexts.

(8) a. Do you currently have the ability to provide me with tea?

b. Do you anticipate giving me a cup of tea in the near future?

We can see the difference quite clearly if we try to add the word please to each sentence. As we noted in Chapter 1, please is a marker of politeness which is restricted to occurring only in requests; it does not occur naturally in other kinds of speech acts. It is possible, and in most cases fairly natural, to add please to any of the sentences in (7), even to those which do not sound very polite on their own. However, this is not possible for the sentences in (8). This difference provides good evidence for saying that the sentences in (8) are not naturally interpretable as indirect requests.

(9) a. Could you possibly give me some tea, please?

b. Will you give me some tea, please?

c. I would like you to give me some tea, please.

d. Are you going to give me some tea (?please)?

e. Do you currently have the ability to provide me with tea (#please)?

f. Do you anticipate giving me a cup of tea in the near future (#please)?

The contrast between the acceptability of (7b) and (7e) as requests vs. the unacceptability of their close paraphrases in (8) suggests that the form of the sentence, as well as its semantic content, helps to determine whether an indirect speech act will be successful or not. We will return to this issue below, but first we need to think about a more fundamental question: How does the hearer recognize an indirect speech act? In other words, how does he know that the primary (intended) illocutionary force of the utterance is not the same as the literal force suggested by the form of the sentence?

Searle suggests that the key to solving this problem comes from Grice’s Cooperative Principle. If someone asks the person sitting next to him at a dinner Can you pass me the salt?, we might expect the addressee to be puzzled. Only under the most unusual circumstances would this question be relevant to the current topic of conversation. Only under the most unusual circumstances would the answer to this question be informative, since few people who can sit up at a dinner table are physically unable to lift a salt shaker. In most contexts, the addressee could only believe the speaker to be obeying the Co-operative Principle if the question is not meant as a simple request for information, i.e., if the intended illocutionary force is something other than a question.

Having recognized this question as an indirect speech act, how does the addressee figure out what the intended illocutionary force is? Searle’s solution is essentially the Gricean method of calculating implicatures, enriched by an understanding of the Felicity Conditions for the intended speech act. Searle (1975) suggests that the addressee might reason as follows: “This question is not relevant to the current topic of conversation, and the speaker cannot be in doubt about my ability to pass the salt. I believe him to be cooperating in the conversation, so there must be another point to the question. I know that a preparatory condition for making a request is the belief that the addressee is able to perform the requested action. I know that people often use salt at dinner, sharing a common salt shaker which they pass back and forth as requested. Since he has mentioned a preparatory condition for requesting me to perform this action, I conclude that this request is what he means to communicate.”

So it is important that we understand indirect speech acts as a kind of conversational implicature. However, they are different in certain respects from the implicatures that Grice discussed. For example, Grice stated that implicatures are “non-detachable”, meaning that semantically equivalent sentences should trigger the same implicatures in the same context. However, as we noted above, this is not always true with indirect speech acts. In the current example, Searle points out that the question Are you able to pass me the salt? , although a close paraphrase of Can you pass me the salt? , is much less likely to be interpreted as a request (# Are you able to please pass me the salt? ). How can we account for this?

Searle argues that, while the meaning of the indirect speech act is calculable or explainable in Gricean terms, the forms of indirect speech acts are partly conventionalized. Searle refers to these as “conventions of usage”, in contrast to normal idioms like kick the bucket (for ‘die’) which we might call conventions of meaning or sense.

Conventionalized speech acts are different from normal idioms in several important ways. First, the meanings of normal idioms are not calculable or predictable from their literal meanings. The phrase kick the bucket contains no words which have any component of meaning relating to death.

Second, when an indirect speech act is performed, both the literal and primary acts are understood to be part of what is meant. In Searle’s terms, the primary act is performed “by way of” performing the literal act. We can see this because, as illustrated in (10), the hearer could appropriately reply to the primary act alone (A1), the literal act alone (A2), or to both acts together (A3). Moreover, in reporting indirect speech acts, it is possible (and in fact quite common) to use matrix verbs which refer to the literal act rather than the primary act, as illustrated in (11–12).

(10) Q: Can you (please) tell me the time? A1: It’s almost 5:30. A2: No, I’m sorry, I can’t; my watch has stopped. A3: Yes, it’s 5:30.

(11) a. Will you (please) pass me the salt? b. He asked me whether I would pass him the salt.

(12) a. I want you to leave now (please). b. He told me that he wanted me to leave.

In this way indirect speech acts are quite similar to other conversational implicatures, in that both the sentence meaning and the pragmatic inference are part of what is communicated. They are very different from normal idioms, which allow either the idiomatic meaning (the normal interpretation), or the literal meaning (under unusual circumstances), but never both together. The two senses of a normal idiom are antagonistic, as we can see by the fact that some people use them to form (admittedly bad) puns:

(13) Old milkmaids never die — they just kick the bucket. 7

Birner (2012/2013: 196) points out that under Searle’s view, indirect speech acts are similar to generalized conversational implicatures. In both cases the implicature is part of the default interpretation of the utterance; it will arise unless it is blocked by specific features in the context, or is explicitly negated, etc. We have to work pretty hard to create a context in which the question Can you pass the salt? would not be interpreted as a request, but it can be done. 8

Searle states that politeness is one of the primary reasons for using an indirect speech act. Notice that all of the sentences in (7), except perhaps (7f), sound more polite than the simple imperative: Give me some tea! He suggests that this motivation may help to explain why certain forms tend to be conventionalized for particular purposes.

7 Richard Lederer (1988) Get Thee to a Punnery. Wyrick & Company.

8 Searle (1975: 69) suggests that a doctor might ask such a question to check on the progress of a patient with an injured arm.

Speech Act and Original Meaning

• First Online: 04 November 2023

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• Zhuanglin Hu 4  

Part of the book series: Peking University Linguistics Research ((PKULR,volume 8))

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Contemporary semantics attempts to explain the understanding of metaphor from the restriction of semantic choices and semantic variation theory (Matthews, 1971), but these theories are based on the idea of metaphor as a phenomenon of substitution or change of meaning. This difference between the original meaning and rhetorical meaning of words is not satisfactory. As far as semantics is concerned, it fails to explain how the language users understand the meaning of seemingly variable sentences, nor does it show that some sentences with clear meaning can express metaphors. Example 1 expresses both literal meaning and metaphorical meaning.

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Hu, Z. (2023). Speech Act and Original Meaning. In: Metaphor and Cognition. Peking University Linguistics Research, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3852-0_11

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