Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
2005
Speech Acts
0.
John Austin (1962): How to do things with words. (William James Lectures, Harvard 1955)
Stephen Levinson (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press: Chapter 5.
John Searle (1969): Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language
John Searly and Daniel Vanderveken (1985): Foundations of illocutionary acts.
Examples like these, but many more, are not subject to the categories of truth and falsity.
(2)
More examples:
(3)
Grammar can serve the same purpose. The three major sentence modes (universal in all languages)
are commonly equated with the acts of asserting (= subject to truth/falsity), questioning, command
(saying as acting).
1.
2.
Stenuis
Many sentences (if not all) are essentially beyond a treatment in terms of truth and falsity.
They can only be understood as verbal moves in an interaction scheme.
3.
Austin
Austin notes that these violations are not all of equal stature. Violations of A and B conditions give
rise to misfires while violations of C are called abuses. The latter are usually harder to detect than
misfires.
How can we tell whether a performative act has occured?
Performative verbs used in simple present tense sentences with first person singular subjects.
Moreover: Performative acts seem to come along in many forms. Not all are formally specified as
above (implicit performatives):
(7)
One way out: Searle's expressibility principle (1969): Any speech act can be paraphrased as an
explicit performative act "what can be said, can be said explicitely".
Exercise/Discussion: Certain "acts" pose a puzzle in this classification. Austin mentiones the
performative act of offending and notes that it seems to refute explicite performativeness:
(8)
Are effects like entertain, delight, annoy, offend, bore "speech acts" or other ways of doing things
with words?
The observation that what was said needs not always carry the intended speech act on its sleeves led
Austin to the following three-way distinction:
1. Locutionary act: The utterance of a sentence with determinare sense and reference.
Give me an apple.
4.
Wittgenstein: an unlimited number; Stenius: three; Austin: a large, perhaps unlimited number which
fall in 5 distinct classes.
Verdicitves: offer a certain state of facts as true (describe, declare not guilty)
Exercitives: convey a motive or inclination for a certain kind of behaviour (command, advise)
Kommissives: committ the speaker to a certain activity (promise, guarantee)
Expositives: offer a certain view or position in an argument (agree, negate, illustrate)
Behabitives: reactions to the behaviour of other persons (apologize, congratulate, swear)
Austins classificatory system, as well as later ones, suffer from a lack of systematic coverage of all
possible dimensions in which speech acts can vary. (Note: Zeno Vendler extended Austin's
classification by two further classes, Operatives, and Interrogatives) In prinicple, language
communities are able to conventionalize an infinity of social interactive patterns into speech acts. It is
as yet unclear whether there are limits to such conventionalizations.
Exercise:
Think of a new speech act that might be implemented in German or English.
Compare the English verb ask and its German counterparts. Does "ask" express one or two
different speech acts? What do you think about explicit performatives as diagnostics for the
number of speech acts?
1
5.
Searle
The question whether there can be any systematic classification of speech act types is still open.
Could you think of criteria of classification?