SPEECH ACT THEORY AND PRAGMATICS

SPEECH ACT THEORY

AND PRAGMATICS
Edited by

JOHN R. SEARLE
University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.

FERENC KIEFER
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris

and

MANFRED BIERWISCH
Academy of Sciences of the G.D.R., Berlin

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY

DORDRECHT: HOLLAND I BOSTON : U .S.A.

LONDON: ENGLAND
 library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title :

Speech act theory and pragmatics.

(Synthese language library; v. l0)

Includes bibliographies and indexes.
1. Speech acts (Linguistics)-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2.
Semiotics-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Searle, John R. II. Kiefer,
Ferenc. III. Bierwisch, Manfred . IV. Series.
P9S.SS .S63 412 79-26973
ISBN-13 ; 978-90-277-1045-1 e-ISBN-13 : 978-94-009-8964-1
DOl : 10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1

Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,

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Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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 T ABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION vii

MANFRED BIERWISCH / Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force 1

STEVEN DAVIS / Perlocutions 37
GILLES FAUCONNIER / Pragmatic Entailment and Questions 57
ROLAND R. HAUSSER / Surface Compositionality and the Semantics
of Mood 71
FERENC KIEFER / Yes-No Questions as Wh-Questions 97
HANS-HEINRICH LIEB / Syntactic Meanings 121
WOLFGANG MOTSCH / Situational Context and Illocutionary Force 155
ROLAND POSNER / Semantics and Pragmatics of Sentence Connec-
tives in Natural Language 169
FRAN<;OIS RltcANATI / Some Remarks on Explicit Performatives,
Indirect Speech Acts, Locutionary Meaning and Truth-Value 205
JOHN R. SEARLE / The Background of Meaning 221
PETR SGALL / Towards a Pragmatically Based Theory of Meaning 233
DANIEL V ANDERVEKEN / Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating
Speech Acts 247
ZENO VENDLER / Telling the Facts 273
DIETER WUNDERLICH / Methodological Remarks on Speech Act
Theory 291

INDEX OF NAMES 313

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 315

 INTRODUCTION

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral

terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and
theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to
clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the
use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics".
The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech
acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica-
tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of
certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving
orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc.
Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a
sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence
or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those
exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they
are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such
as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do
with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the
hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading,
annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts. Illocu-
tionary acts such as stating are often directed at or done for the purpose of
achieving perlocutionary effects such as convincing or persuading, but it has
seemed crucial to the theorists of speech acts, unlike earlier behavioristic the-
orists of language, to distinguish the illocutionary act, which is a speech act
proper, from the achievement of the perlocutionary effect, which mayor may
not be achieved by specifically linguistic means. Furthermore, within the illocu-
tionary act there are certain subsidiary propositional acts such as referring to
an object, or expressing the proposition that such and such. It has seemed
necessary to speech act theorists to make the distinction between propositional
and illocutionary acts because the same reference or the same expression of a
proposition can occur in different illocutionary acts. Thus, for example, in
a statement about President Carter or in a question about President Carter,
the same act of reference to President Carter is made even though the total
illocutionary acts are different. Also, in the sequence of utterances, "Please
vii
J. R. Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch (eds.), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics,
vii-xii.
Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
viii INTRODUCTION

leave the room", "You will leave the room", and "Will you leave the room?"
the same proposition, that you will leave the room, is expressed in the per-
formance of three different illocutionary acts, one a request, one a prediction,
and one a question. This last distinction between the illocutionary act and the
propositional act has suggested to most theorists who write about speech acts
that there is a typical logical form of the illocutionary act whereby it has a
propositional content (P) and that propositional content is presented with a
certain illocutionary force F, giving the total act the structure F(P). Finally,
in the theory of speech acts there is a customary distinction between direct
speech acts, where the speaker says what he means, and indirect speech acts
where he means something more than what he says. For example in a standard
dinner table situation when a speaker says "Can you pass the salt?" he per-
forms the direct speech act of asking whether the hearer can pass the salt but
normally also the indirect speech act of requesting the hearer to pass the salt.
Most of the standard authors on the subject of speech acts would accept
something like the above distinctions, but when it comes to the notion of
pragmatics, the situation is much more confused. "Pragmatics" is one of
those words ("societal" and "cognitive" are others) that give the impression
that something quite specific and technical is being talked about, when often
in fact it has no clear meaning. The motivation for introducing this term,
which was done by Charles Morris and later Rudolf Carnap, was to distinguish
pragmatics from syntax [or "syntactics"] and semantics. According to
Morris's earliest formulation of this distinction (1938), syntactics studies
"the formal relations of signs to one another". Semantics studies "the rela-
tions of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable." And pragmatics
studies "the relations of signs to interpreters". But this distinction between
pragmatics and semantics is very unsatisfactory. For example, taken strictly,
the above defmitions would have the consequence that pragmatics is a branch
of semantics, since signs are clearly "applicable" to interpreters. Morris later
modified this defmition, and redefmed pragmatics as "that branch of semiotics
which studies the origins, the uses, and the effects of signs" (1946). Camap
(1942), following Morris's earlier position, gave the following defmition,
which has proved influential to subsequent authors:

If, in an investigation, explicit reference is made to the speaker, or to put it in more gen-
eral terms, to the user of the language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics ... If
we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their de-
signata, we are in the field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designata also
and analyze only the relations between the expressions, we are in [logical] syntax. The
whole science of language, consisting of the three parts mentioned, is called "semiotics".
 INTRODUCTION ix

With the background of these early statements (or confusions) in Morris

and Carnap, it is now possible to distinguish at least three different more or
less traditional attitudes to "pragmatics". They are related to the development
of formal philosophy, linguistic semantics, and ordinary language philosophy.
The differences among these attitudes, growing out of their respective tradi-
tions and orientations, are mainly determined by different conceptions of the
nature of meaning, yielding different views about the relation between seman-
tics and pragmatics. The key notions in these different accounts of meaning
are the denotation, sense, and use oflinguistic expressions.
The first tradition, the direct descendant of Carnap's work, is that of for-
mal philosophy and logic, as exemplified by such authors as Montague, Lewis,
and Cresswell. According to this view, language is an interpreted formal sys-
tem, where the interpretation in question assigns a denotation to each expres-
sion belonging to the system. On this account, the meaning of an expression
is explained in terms of the things it denotes. Thus a sentence like "It is rain-
ing" denotes the class of all situations where it is raining, or in sum, the
proposition that it is raining. Pragmatics, then, is concerned with the way in
which the interpretation of syntactically defined expressions depends on the
particular conditions of their use in context. A recent formulation of this
view is to be found in Stalnaker [1972] :
Syntax studies sentences, semantics studies propositions. Pragmatics is the study of
linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed. There are two major types
of problems to be solved within pragmatics: first to defme interesting types of speech
acts and speech products; second, to characterize the features of the speech context
which help determine which proposition is expressed by a given sentence. The analysis
of illocutionary acts is an example of the problem of the first kind; the study of indexical
expressions is an example of the second.

According to this use, speech act theory, together with the study of index-
ical expressions, make up most, or perhaps all, of the domain of pragmatics.
Contrasting with these views, the second tradition assumes sense rather
than denotation to be the core notion of semantics. According to this concep-
tion, the meaning of an expression is determined by the sense relations (such
as synonymy, antonymy, entailment, etc.) that it bears to other expressions
within the system. On this account, the sense of an expression can be distin-
guished as its context-free, literal meaning from the context-<iependent,
actual meaning of an utterance of that expression. The utterance meaning,
although determined by the sense of the sentence uttered, differs from it in
various ways, just as the acoustic realization of an utterance differs from the
phonological structure of the sentence uttered. Thus, semantics, according to
x INTRODUCTION

this tradition, studies all aspects of the literal meaning of sentences and other
expressions, while pragmatics is concerned with the conditions according to
which speakers and hearers determine the context- and use-dependent utter-
ance meanings. A typical expression of this view is in Katz (1977): "Prag-
matics is performance theory at the semantic level." According to this
position, the analysis of both indexical expressions and speech acts belongs in
part to semantics, in part to pragmatics. As to indexical expressions, semantics
is basically concerned with conditions of coreference, leaving the determina-
tion of actual reference to pragmatics. Thus the rules - according to which
"he" and "his" in "He hurt his hand" mayor may not be coreferential, while
"he" and "her" in "He hurt her hand" cannot have the same referent - are
part of semantics, whereas the determination of the actual referents of "he",
"his", and "her" in a given context follows from rules of pragmatics. A similar
partition applies to speech acts. Insofar as the illocutionary potential of a
sentence is determined by its context-free, literal meaning, then it is part of
its semantic structure, and its study is in the domain of semantics. Insofar as
its illocutionary potential depends on the context of utterance, including the
intentions of the speaker, its study belongs to the domain of pragmatics. A
typical example of the distinction would arise in the study of indirect speech
acts. In an indirect speech act, the speaker says one thing, means what he
says, but he also means something more. A speaker might, for example, say
to a hearer, "You are standing on my foot." And he might mean "You are
standing on my foot", but in most contexts, he would likely mean something
more, such as "Please get off my fOOL" In such an utterance, the direct speech
act expressed by the literal meaning of the sentence lies in the domain of
semantics. The indirect speech act, expressed in the speaker's utterance mean-
ing insofar as it differs from the literal meaning of the sentence, lies within
the domain of pragmatics.
It is perhaps an ironic feature of the use of the expression "pragmatics" in
the current philosophical and linguistic literature that many of the authors
who are most commonly described as working within the area of pragmatics
do not use this expression at all, for example, Austin, Grice, and Searle. In
this third tradition, which derives in part from the late Wittgenstein, the core
notion in the explanation of meaning is the use of the expressions of a given
language. This is in turn explained in terms of the intentions speakers conven-
tionally have in using these expressions. Although there is a fairly clear dis-
tinction between the speaker's (actual) meaning and the conventionalized
sentence meaning, there is on this account no way of sorting out the context-
free meaning of a linguistic expression, since even the strictly conventionalized
 INTRODUCTION xi

usage is always related to a background of unstated assumptions and practices.

From this it follows that, contrary to the assumption made in the second
approach, literal meaning cannot be identified with context-free meaning. It
can now be seen, why the authors working in this tradition hardly ever use
the term "pragmatics": taking the conventionalized, context-dependent use
of linguistic expressions to be the essence of meaning, they fmd no clear dis-
tinction between semantics and pragmatics, except that semantics might be
considered a branch of pragmatics, viz. that branch which deals with how
literal meanings of sentences determine their truth-conditions, other condi-
tions of satisfaction, and general semantic relations, such as entailment,
against a background of practices and assumptions. From this point of view,
indexical expressions and speech acts have no particularly "pragmatic" status.
Indexicals, just like any other referring expressions, are means of performing
the act of referring, under the appropriate conditions. And the illocutionary
force of an utterance is as much a part of its meaning - Le., of the rules of its
use - as any other semantic component.
It has not been our aim in this discussion to attempt to adjudicate between
these three traditions, or even to insist that the three traditions represent
well-defmed philosophical-linguistic theses rather than tendencies or attitudes.
In all three traditions something like a notion of literal meaning is essential,
and some contrast between literal meaning and speaker's utterance meaning
seems essential to any account of language. Speaker's utterance meaning may
differ from literal meaning in a variety of ways. Speaker's meaning may
include literal meaning but go beyond it, as in the case of indirect speech acts,
or it may depart from it, as in the case of metaphor, or it may be the opposite
of it, as in the case of irony. The distinction, in short, between speaker's
meaning and sentence meaning is common to all theories of speech acts; the
question is whether that distinction is the same as the distinction between
context-free meanings (semantics) and context-dependent meanings (prag-
matics).

THE EDITORS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carnap, R.: 1942,lntroduction to Semantics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Katz, J.: 1977, Propositional Structure and lllocutionary Force, New York, Crowell and
Co.
Morris, Charles: 1938, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia
of Unified Science, Vol. I, No.2, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
xii INTRODUCTION

Morris, Charles: 1946, Signs, Language and Behavior, New York, Prentice Hall.
Stalnaker, R. C.: 1972, 'Pragmatics,' in Davidson and Harman (eds.), Semantics of
Natural Language, Dordrecht, D. Reidel.