Speech Act Analysis
Speech act analysis is the empirical, qualitative method of examining real utterances for the actions they perform — promising, requesting, apologizing, warning, declaring — rather than merely for what they describe. Building on J. L. Austin's insight that saying is doing and on John Searle's systematic taxonomy of illocutionary acts, the analyst segments discourse into utterances, identifies the illocutionary force of each, classifies it (as a representative, directive, commissive, expressive, or declaration), and notes whether the act is performed directly or indirectly. It turns the philosophy of language into a coding procedure that can be applied to conversations, written texts, and elicited data.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press. · ISBN 9780198245537
- Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 9780521096263
- Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23. · DOI 10.1017/S0047404500006837
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.