Teacher: Dr.

Abdennour Kharraki
Course: Semantics & Pragmatics

Speech Act Theory

1. Introduction
During the sixties linguists and philosophers found it very difficult to articulate new
challenging ideas in the field of language study. This is because the Chomsky’s
Transformational Grammar (TG) was very impressive and any voice who dared to
challenge this school should introduce a very strong and well worked linguistic
framework capable of resistance. In the course of that time, a theory which came to
be known speech act made a big revolution in the world of language and philosophy.
Since then, it has been applied to philosophy and linguistics especially to its
pragmatic variant.. It is worthy of mentioning that speech act theory was first
introduced by the Oxford philosopher Austin in 1962 and explained in his book How
to Do Things with Words. This book consists of lectures delivered by himself and
collected by J. O. Urmson after Austin’s death. His American student at Oxford in
the fifties, John R. Searle, became the main proponent and developer of his ideas.

2. Austin’s Performative/Constative Dichotomy

Austin’s theory of speech act came to reconsider one of the mainstays of semantics,
concerned with truth conditions. Truth conditional tradition is relevant only to
certain sentences which are mostly called declaratives. For a sentence to be true or
false, it must contain a proposition about the world. In sentences like the following:

(1) It’s raining outside

Suffice it to go outside to see if it is raining or not. Falsity or truth of the proposition
or of the ‘declaration’ is subject to a simple test, which enables us to get information.
Such statements which aim at conveying information are called CONSTATIVES But
suppose we had utterances like:

(2) Happy Birthday!

(3) Congratulations!
(4) Well done!
 (5) Good luck

According to these examples, only truth of feelings or truth of my articulations of

these words is involved. The utterances cannot communicate the truth of the wish.
This is simply ascribed to the fact that wishes are not propositions, but words that do
things in the world, or in Austin’s words speech acts or more precisely
PERFORMATIVES. Such utterances do not communicate information but perform
actions. For more understanding of Austin’s (1962) performative utterances, let us
consider the following utterances:

(6) I name this sheep Queen Elisabeth II

(7) Ɂati taliq! (i.e., you are divorced)
(8) Sammajtu-ka Mohamed!
(9) I apologize for my mistake.
(10) I promise you to attend to your party.

At first sight, we discover that the examples above have different communicative
functions or forces (i.e., speaker’s communicative intention) (see Thomas, 1996:18-
22). For example, (9) and (10) refer to the social or social psychological function of
apologizing and promising respectively. (6), (7) and (8) are utterances which do not
only inform or describe a state of affair but also perform actions. When you name a
ship in an inauguration ceremony or name a child, or divorcing, you are performing
an act. The act of divorce in this example leads us, on the other hand, to think of the
possibility to study the effects of utterances on the behaviour of speaker and hearer,
using a threefold distinctive acts, namely locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and
perlocutionary acts. The following section will address these acts in turn.

3. Locution, Illocution and Perlocution

Developing his performative-constative dichotomy, Austin proposed three distinctive
aspects of speech acts:
 Locution: the actual words uttered
 Illocution: the force or intention behind the words
 Perlocution: the effect of the illocution on the hearer

By way of illustration, the following utterance is suggested:

(11) It’s hot in here!

The locutionary aspect of the utterance lies in the words that make up this sentence
(i.e., It’s hot in here.). The illocutionary aspect of the utterance refers to the force or
the intention behind uttering these words, which is that: I want some fresh air! The
perlocutionary aspect of the utterance indicates the social or psychological effects
that it brings about, which is that someone opens the window.
Austin originally (1960:52) used the term “speech act”, but readers should be
careful about terminology since this term and the terms illocutionary act,
illocutionary force, pragmatic force or just force are used interchangeably though
they mean different things, strictly speaking.
In what follows I will investigate how Searle classified the illocutionary acts.

4. Searles’ Classification of Illocutionary Acts

The illocutionary acts has received much attention on the part of theorists. As Mey
(1993:113) maintained:

The illocutionary force, is what has occupied speech act theorists most
(even though, from a pragmatic point of view, the perlocutionary aspect
is the most interesting one, and (…) the key that to the understanding of
what people use their illocutionary acts for)

There are many types of illocutionary acts. Sometimes we cannot even control them.
That is why a number of attempts have been made to classify them. Searle (1976)
sets up five basic types. I will study them briefly:

 Representatives: The speaker is committed, in varying

degrees, to the truth of a proposition, e.g. affirm,
believe, conclude, deny, report, predict, certify, agree
deny, disagree suggest, protest, evaluate, etc.

 Directives: The speaker tries to get the hearer to do

something, e.g. ask, challenge, command, insist, order,
forbid, exempt, request, etc.

 Commissives: The speaker is committed, in varying

degrees, to a certain course of action, e.g. guarantee,
pledge, promise, swear, vow, offer, etc.

 Expressives: It is also called Evaluatives. The speaker

expresses an attitude about a state of affairs, e.g.,
 apologize, condole, deplore, congratulate, thank,
welcome.

 Declarations: The speaker alters the external status or

condition of an object or situation solely by making
the utterance, e.g., I resign, I baptize, You’re fired,
War is hereby declared.

5. Felicity Conditions
A speech act is said to happen ‘felicitously’ or ‘happily’ without any ‘misfire’ if it
satisfies a number of conditions called felicity conditions. Austin (1962:14-15)
enumerated his felicity conditions as follows:
A: (i) there must be a conventional procedure having
a conventional effect.
(ii) the circumstances and persons must be appropriate.

B: the procedure must be executed (i) correctly (ii)

completely.

C: Often
(i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts,
feelings and intentions and
(ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the
relevant parties must do it.

I will discuss each condition in turn.

5.1. Condition A
(i)

This condition is culturally specific. That is, its practice is different from one culture
to another. In the Muslim world for example, marriage takes certain conventional
procedures or norms to be culturally as well as administratively acceptable. First we
need a couple (a man and a woman). They must be declared a husband and a wife in
an authorized place accompanied by witnesses and parents of the couple or someone
else who could fulfill this religious role to sign the marriage contract. Then a
ceremony must be organized for everybody to know about the marriage.
(ii)
Such conditions takes into consideration the ‘the circumstances and persons must be
appropriate’. In an inauguration ceremony for example, we need to have motives for
such practice. We need to have a particular place and time. We also need the right
person to fulfill it; may be a governor or Mayer, etc.

5.2. Condition B
Again, if we take the example of marriage, we need to have precise and correct
words to be pronounced like, zawwa-tuka nafsi. Further, the marriage is only
complete when all witnesses and wali (i.e. responsible for the couple) sign the
marriage contract.

5.3. Condition C
(i)
One possible clear example lies in the fact that marriage should be based on
agreement between the couple. No party should be forced under duress (shotgun
weddings) to get married to somebody s/he does not want. In Islam, before marriage,
one should reveal all his shortcomings (i.e., mental, physical if the illness does not
appear, etc.)

(ii)
This condition is ve1ry hard to illustrate. But in the case of marriage, we could say
that it is null and void if it is not ‘consummated’, to use the terms of Thomas (1996:
39). That is complete a marriage by sexual intercourse (i.e., dduxla).

6. Indirect Speech Acts

Not all speech acts are directly addressed. In fact, most of them are expressed
indirectly in everyday transaction for some social reasons. For example, one speech
act is expressed differently. One way of doing this is use an utterance (e.g., request)
straightway without soft linguistic items such as in the following sentence:
 keep your voice down.
In this case, our request is taken to mean an order lacking in linguistic politeness. We
could get our request using more elaborate linguistic forms like in the following
sentences:
  I would be very grateful, if you could keep your voice down.
 Could you please keep your voice down?
 Does it bother you at all if you keep your voice down?
 Would you mind keeping your voice down.

The list is by no means exhaustive. For more detailed and advanced discussion of
the issue of indirectness in pragmatics, students are referred to the works of Thomas,
1996: Ch 5).