Speech Act Theory

Speech Act

A speech act is an utterance which has both a literal meaning and a particular illucotionary force.

Austin argues that are three kinds of act which occur with any sentence or utterance. These are the locutionary, the illucotionary act and the perlocutionary act. The locutionary act refer to the factual words. The illucotioary act refers to the speaker’s intention in uttering the words. The perlucotionary act refers to the effect this utterance has can thoughts or actions of the other person. The term speech act is most often used to refer to the second of these, the illucotionary act, or force of ain utterance.

Sentence Structure And Language Function

There are several ways of expressing certain speech act from linguistic point of view. For example, we often use a question, or intergative form to find out something out, a declarative form to make a statement, and a imperative to get someone doing something.

Direct And Indirect Speech Act

Indirect speech act are often difficult for second language learners to recognize as they may not necessarily know that in english.

Speech act which contain a performative verb are also often direct speech acts since they perform their function in a direct and literal manner. It is clear however that many sentences do not contain a performative verb and if they do it is not always the case that the speech act is the same as this verb might suggest.

Searle used the criteria and the notion of constitutive rules to describe five basci rules types of speech act, these are :

Representative ; utterance which commit the speaker to the truth of a particular proposition, such as asserting.

Directives ; utterances which attempt to get someone to do something such as ordering.

Commisives : utterances which commit the speaker to a future course of action, such as promising.

Expressive : utterances which express a particular psychology state, such as apologising.

Declarations: utterances which bring about an immediate change in a state affairs such as excommunicating.

Rules Vs Principle.

Speech act analysis also as Thomas argues need to take account of physical and social context of use, as well as the fact that meaning is not based on words alone but involves negotiation and interaction between speakers and hearers of language. That is it needs to take account of the different contributions that speakers and hearers make the meaning of interactions.

The notion of speech act and work and in the area of speech act theopry in general, was an improtant step forward toward helping us understand unspoken aspects of what people mean and say. The way of speech act are performed across languages and cultures can differ enormously, however something that speech act theory, in its early days, did not attend to. Most the early work in speech act theory also was based on made up rather than  real life examples of languages use. This has also changed in more recent work in the area. The work that is generaly described as cross cultural pragmatics is an important development in this area of investigation.

Speech Act And Cross Cultural Pragmatics.

When speaker from different cultures interact more than one set of social and cultural norms and assumptions are at work. Information and argument for example are organised differently in different cultures. The meaning behind different speech act such as suggestion and refusal,also vary. Communication problems often arise, then because of different sets of underlying norms and assumptions.

Two important nations in the area of cross cultural pragmatics are what leech terms pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics.

Culture specific studies of speech act use have included requests in American English and Isrealie Hebrew, opening, closing, feedback and politeness markers in german and english, ways of expressing agreement, complimenting, thanking and apologising in japanese and english and questioning strategies in swedish and english.

The Cooperative Principle

Pragmatics explores the relationship between meaning, context and communication. There are two key concepts in this area of investigation. These are speaker meaning and the cooperative principle.

According to Grice people assume that there are some kind of rules for interaction that direct us to a particular interpretation of what person is saying. Unless we receive some indication to the contrary. He describes the cooperative principle thus :

“make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.(Grice 1975:45)