Speech Acts
Speech act theory studies how utterances are used to perform actions, such as asserting, promising, requesting, and naming, rather than merely describing the world.
Definition
A speech act is an act performed in or by uttering something; speech act theory analyses the kinds of acts utterances perform and the conditions under which they succeed.
Scope
This area covers the theory of language as action, originating in Austin's observation that many utterances do not state facts but perform acts. It treats the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts; the analysis of performatives and the felicity conditions that govern their success; Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts and his constitutive-rule analysis; and the problem of indirect speech acts, where one act is performed by way of another.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What kinds of action do we perform by uttering sentences?
- What conditions must hold for a speech act to be felicitous?
- How can illocutionary acts be classified?
- How are indirect speech acts performed and understood?
Key concepts
- performative vs. constative
- locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary acts
- felicity conditions
- illocutionary force
- Searle's taxonomy (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, declarations)
- indirect speech act
Key theories
- Austin's performative-constative and locution trichotomy
- Austin showed that some utterances perform acts rather than describe, and analysed every utterance into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts governed by felicity conditions.
- Searle's constitutive-rule analysis and taxonomy
- Searle analysed illocutionary acts in terms of constitutive rules and felicity conditions and proposed a taxonomy of five basic types: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations.
History
Austin's 1955 William James Lectures, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), launched speech act theory by distinguishing performatives from constatives and analysing illocutionary acts. Searle systematized the theory in Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979), providing felicity conditions and a taxonomy, and the framework became central to pragmatics and the philosophy of language.
Debates
- Are there literal forces conventionally tied to sentence types?
- Whether illocutionary force is conventionally encoded by sentence type and explicit performatives, or whether force is largely a matter of inference and context, as the analysis of indirect speech acts suggests.
Key figures
- J. L. Austin
- John Searle
- Stephen Levinson
- Kent Bach
Related topics
Seminal works
- austin1962
- searle1969
- searle1979
Frequently asked questions
- What is a speech act?
- It is an action performed by uttering language, such as making a promise, issuing an order, or asking a question; speech act theory holds that saying something is often a way of doing something, not merely describing the world.