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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400

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Editorial
Speech acts in legal language: introduction

‘‘One of the particularities of any language of law consists in the fact that the validity – in the sense of its
correctness – of its sentences depends not only upon syntactical and semantical, but also upon pragmatical
conditions’’ (Oppenheim, 1942:11).

One of the most striking pragmatic properties of legal documents concerns their performative character. Besides
norms laying out duties and norms conferring rights, every legal system contains rules productive of legal effects by
the very act of being uttered, such as ‘‘regulation X is hereby revoked’’: here the legislator’s utterance neither describes
nor prescribes a behaviour; rather it brings about, or, to use a technical term, constitutes, a new state of affairs. As noted
by Carcaterra (1990:117) among others, the traditional dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive discourse fails
to account for such forms of legal production and must be complemented by the investigation of their performative
function. Oddly, such a dimension, which discloses an area of intersection worth investigating between legal theory
and analytical philosophy, has been overlooked in important works on legal language. As remarked by Garzone
(2000:398):

In dealing with contracts Trosborg (1994:312ff), while correctly emphasising that legal speech acts cannot be
translated literally, classifies them as directive, commissive and constitutive (using the word constitutive, quite
oddly, not with the meaning of ‘performative’ but rather to mean ‘sentences used to explain or define expressions
and terms in the contract or to supply information concerning the application of the statute’), thus overlooking
performativeness altogether. As a consequence, when discussing the meaning of verb forms in legal speech acts
in a translation, she attributes a purely deontic meaning to shall, while in legal texts I have shown elsewhere
(Garzone, 1996:68ff) that this modal can also have a performative meaning depending on the context.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Pragmatics aims to reassess the contribution that studies of legal language offer
to both the notion of performativity and speech act theory in general. More specifically, applications to specific
domains of legal practice and the adoption of a diachronic dimension will be considered for their insights into both the
nature and pragmalinguistic realization of speech acts in selected legal genres (court trial records: depositions,
indictements; law codes) and the institutional and social settings in which they are (were) performed.
The first paper in the issue, Overruling as a speech act: performativity and normative discourse by Ross
CHARNOCK, takes up the question of the relationship between performativity and normativity. In the common law
system, judges are said to be bound by precedents decided in courts of the same level or above. However, in higher
courts, under certain conditions, they have the right to overrule. Overruling declarations may be analysed as
performative speech acts, having the effect of changing the law. Since the judges are reluctant to be seen as
assuming a legislative function, they tend to use indirect rather than explicit language, especially in the most
significant cases. Alternatively, they present their overruling decisions not as new legislation, but rather as
declarations of the true state of the unchanging common law. The legal validity of overruling declarations depends
to a large extent on their perlocutionary effects. Even after successful performance, these effects may be cancelled
by later decisions in higher courts. The legal effects of overruling decisions thus suggest a close relation between
performativity and normativity.
The following three papers share the adoption of a diachronic perspective on speech act analysis.

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.06.007
394 Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400

Daniel COLLINS’ Indirectness in Legal Speech Acts: An Argument against the Out of Ritual Hypothesis focuses on
the expression of indirect meanings in Medieval Russian law codices, as well as legal speech acts that are recorded in
other premodern languages. The author contends that the language of the law can serve as a test case for the hypothesis
that pragmatic indirectness arose in the later Middle Ages out of ritual language use and offers arguments to prove that
indirectness is far older than is claimed by the Out of Ritual hypothesis. Thus, it need not have grown out of ritual at all,
and, even if it did, this cannot possibly be known from the linguistic evidence available to us from texts, reconstruction,
or typology.
Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials by Barbara KRYK-KASTOVSKY focuses on the speech acts
used in Early Modern English court trials. Courtroom discourse of 17th century England is shown to be amenable
to an analysis in terms of Speech Act Theory as conceived for Modern English usage. Court trial records are
shown to be particularly suitable for such an analysis due to their linguistic characteristics (an abundance of
illocutions and perlocutions as well as question-and-answer exchanges, interpretable as indirect speech acts). The
notion of speech act network is developed, which is shown to be particularly suitable for the analysis of complex
courtroom discourse consisting of interrelated illocutions and their corresponding perlocutions. The study
demonstrates that diachronic speech act theory is a useful framework for a pragmaticist, and that it can reveal the
interdependence between the identifiability of speech acts and the socio-historical conditions of the times when
the speech acts were used.
Formulaic discourse and speech acts in the witchcraft trial records of Salem, 1692 by Kathleen L. DOTY and Risto
HILTUNEN discusses the relationship of function and form in the expression of speech acts at various stages of the legal
process. The notion of form is narrowed to formulaic discourse, which is one of the distinctive features of legal genres.
The results indicate that different speech acts are characteristic of different stages of the legal process. The acts of
accusing and charging are foregrounded in the early stages, while those of denial and confession predominate in the later
ones. Moreover, the participants, whether witnesses, accused, or representatives of the legal authority, use different
discourses in the expression of speech acts, with the legal voices favouring performative actions and standardised
formulae as against individuals resorting to a variety of discourse strategies in trying to argue for their case felicitously.
Earlier versions of all these papers were presented at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference (Riva del Garda,
10–15 July 2005).
In the remainder of this section the two threads underlying the papers collected will be expanded upon: the
modulation of the notion of performativity in legal practice and reflection (section 1) and the adoption of a diachronic
perspective (section 2).

1. Performatives in legal language

‘‘The sense of all truly performative statements is, indeed, magical. They purport to create something. That
which is held to be performed is the creation of a non-physical relationship or property through the pronouncing
of some words. Such doings fall under the category of magic’’ (Olivecrona, 1962:175).
Many original insights into the performative status of legal norms come from philosophers of law. Already at
the beginning of the XVII century, Lessius, in his De justitia et de jure (1609 [1605]:50), writes about promissio
‘promise’ and donatio ‘donation’ as being ‘‘practical signs, actuating what they mean’’: ‘‘Promissio et donatio
sunt signa quaedam practica, efficientia ad ipsum, quod significant’’. Their main intuition concerns the
constitutivity, or, with another term, theticity of legal norms, as well as the opposition between thetic and non-
thetic performative (acts and verbs). In his study of ‘promise’ as a thetic act (i.e. an act of language productive of a
state of affairs), Di Lucia (1997:35) identifies Herbert Spiegelberg’s theory of Festsetzung as one of the first
recognitions of the phenomenon. In his 1935 Gesetz und Sittengesetz Spiegelberg noticed a type of norms, such as
(1) below, that neither have as an object a (commissive or omissive) behaviour nor concern a legal obligation or
the attribution of rights pertaining to the future. Through these norms a state of affairs is realized that does not
allow or need further realization: ‘‘durch die Festsetzung kann z. B. Auch unmittelbar ein Sachverhalt geschaffen
werden, der einer weiteren Verwirklichung weder fähig noch bedürftig ist’’ (54). Spiegelberg calls such statements
Gestaltungsgesetze: ‘‘constitutive norms’’:

1. Rechtsfähig ist jedermann (Schweizer Zivilgesetzbuch Art. 11)

Everyone has legal competency
 Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400 395

Moreover, he notes how the following linguistic forms, that typically express deontic ( prescriptive) meanings, can
have constitutive value: Latin future imperative (2), Latin subjunctive (3), German modal verb sollen (4) (cf. Di Lucia,
1997:43–48):

2. Heres esto
Let. . . be heir

3. Anathema sit
Be excommunicated

4. Buchstabe ‘S’ soll das Satzsubjekt bedeuten

Letter ‘S’ shall indicate the sentence subject

Constitutive norms are opposed to prescriptive norms by Carcaterra (1990). Prescriptive norms, such as (5) below,
aim at producing an event by exerting pressure on someone’s behaviour; constitutive norms, such as (6), produce the
effect, which is their aim and content, by the very act of being stated, thus realizing an immediate, contextual
realization of the desired situation (‘‘immediata, contestuale, realizzazione della situazione desiderata’’: Carcaterra,
1990:117; cf. also Mortara Garavelli, 2001:57–63):

5. Sostituire l’articolo X del Regolamento con il seguente. . .

Replace article X of the regulation with the following. . .

6. L’art. X del Regolamento è sostituito. . .

Art. X of the regulation is replaced

Referring to Austin’s theory of performative utterances, Carcaterra argues that ‘‘constitutive’’ or ‘‘dispositive’’
performatives, which realize at the same time both the act of saying and its content, belong to a ‘‘previously
unforeseen’’ class of performatives, ‘‘cutting across’’ the five categories envisaged by Austin himself (Carcaterra,
1990:125). Underlying constitutive norms would be a performative utterance of the kind:

con la presente norma si dispone (si stabilisce) che. . .

by the present norm it is enacted that. . .

The peculiar status of utterances that affect institutional states of affairs was noted also by Strawson (1964), who
argues that Austin was overly influenced by such utterances and should not have taken them as a model of illocutionary
acts in general (cf. Ross, 1972:209ff; Sbisà, 1989:98).
The fascination with this category of performatives is highlighted by Olivecrona (1962), who attributes a magical
character to them. In the quote in the exergo: ‘‘The sense of all truly performative statements is, indeed, magical. They
purport to create something. That which is held to be performed is the creation of a non-physical relationship or
property through the pronouncing of some words. Such doings fall under the category of magic’’ (175). As an example
of an ancient legal act with a magical character he cites the ceremony for king-making related in old Swedish
provincial laws of the 13th century. This was a complex rite: the man to be king was placed on a holy stone, a formula
was recited many times by the ‘law-men’ of the different provinces, and the insignia of royalty were given to him. In
this way he was supposedly endowed with the mystical powers appertaining to a king (176). The performative
character of legal formulae is obvious: yet such a character is explained by tracing their origins as magic formulae. A
twofold criticism of Austin made by Olivecrona is that Austin did not reflect on the problem of the meaning of
performative utterances; thus he did not seize their magical valencies. As a result, the category of performatives was
diluted to comprise verbs outside the ‘‘real’’ performatives (i.e. those used to create effects outside the psychological
realm), hence loosing sharpness.
A further step in the analysis of constitutive forms is the distinction drawn by Conte (1983, 1985) between speech-
acts that alter the world, or poı́esis speech-acts, and those that designate a ‘‘mere acting through words’’, i.e. prâxis
speech-act. In her own words:
396 Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400

Ever since Austin (1962), it has been maintained that speech-act theory should be part of a more general theory
of action, that speech-acts are a subset of actions in general. If we take this thesis seriously, a typology of speech-
acts should be based on action-theoretical concepts [. . .] The question posed by Searle (1969:69): ‘‘What are the
basic species of illocutionary acts?’’ might be answered like this: basic speech-acts are prâxis speech-acts and
poı́esis speech-acts.

(i) A prâxis speech-act is a mere acting through words.

Prâxis speech-acts are acts like thanking, congratulating, and greeting. But, more interestingly, also stating that
p, denying that p, deploring that p, are prâxis speech-acts which (as such) neither affect nor effect the state of
affairs denoted by p.

(ii) A poı́esis speech-act is a world-changing act.

Poı́esis speech-acts are not only acts like excommunicating, disqualifying, absolving, acquitting, and resigning
(all institutional acts), but also acts like promising, ordering and accusing. The speaker (the agent) by a poı́esis
speech-act effects something: for instance he produces the not-belonging to the community of believers in the
case of excommunicating, or a deontic status (an obligation in the case of an order or a self-commitment in the
case of a promise). Both kinds of acts may of course produce effects (Wirkungen) at the intersubjective level
(they may produce a changing of the context), but only poı́esis speech-acts produce a result (ein Erwirktes). Only
poı́esis speech-acts bring about a change in a state of affairs (Conte, 1985:3).
A parallel distinction is drawn independently by Searle in his 1989 How Performatives Work, a radical rethinking of
both the concept of performative and his previous taxomy of speech-acts (cf. Searle and Vanderveken, 1985). Having
recognized the phenomenon of theticity in his 1975 speech-act theory, where he designates as ‘‘declaratives’’ acts
constitutive of states of affairs, his new claim is that the essential feature of all performatives is their constitutivity, i.e.
the production of a state of affairs that is realized by the accomplishment of the speech-act; in other words: ‘‘all
performative utterances are declarations’’ (Searle, 1989:550). Yet within declarations he introduces a new distinction:
that between linguistic and extra-linguistic declarations:
When we turn to performatives such as ‘I promise to come and see you’, ‘I order you to leave the room’, ‘I state
that it is raining’, etc., we find that these, like our earlier declarations, also create new facts, but in these cases, the
facts created are linguistic facts; the fact that a promise has been made, an order given, a statement issued, etc. To
mark these various distinctions, let’s distinguish between extra-linguistic declarations – such as adjourning the
meeting, pronouncing somebody man and wife, declaring war, etc. – and linguistic declarations—such as
promising, ordering, and stating by way of declaration (549).

Notice how the same speech act, that of promising, is considered as a poı́esis speech-act, that is a world-changing
act, by Conte, and as a non-thetic act by Searle. Di Lucia (1997:41), in fact, criticises Searle’s account of ‘‘one of the
most awe-inspiring performatives’’ (Austin, 1962:117)—the act of promising, on two grounds: firstly, for not having
recognized the role of the promisee in the act; secondly, for not having acknowledged the constitutive character of such
an act. As noted also by Conte (1983:119–120), Searle (1975) classified promising as a commissive and not a
declarative act, and in his 1989 essay he classified it among linguistic declarations, thus overlooking the thetic nature
of such an act (cf. also Charnock’s critical account of Austin’s and Reinach’s work on promises in this volume).
One of the most fine-grained explorations into the philosophy of performatives is Conte’s work on normative
language. Conte (2002) introduces three distinctions within performative verbs: (i) thetic vs. non-thetic (thetici vs.
non-tetici); (ii) anairetic vs. non-anairetic (anairetici vs. non-anairetici); (iii) (within non-thetic) rhetic vs. non-rhetic
(rhetici vs. non-rhetici). The most relevant category for deontics and philosophy of law is that of thetic performatives;
such is the performativity of words that alter the world, that produce a state of affairs: accusare accuse, invalidare
invalidate, consacrare consecrate, scomunicare excommunicate, abrogare abrogate, bandire ban, proclamare
proclaim, revocare revoke, condannare convict, abdicare abdicate, assolvere absolve, promulgare promulgate, etc.
(63–64): to excommunicate someone is not to communicate her/his exclusion from the community of believers, it is
the production of such a status; to repeal a norm is not to say it is invalid, but to make it invalid. Within thetic
 Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400 397

performatives Conte identifies anairetic acts, which he defines as ‘‘negative linguistic acts’’, i.e. as acts that undo an
extant state of affairs: thus abrogare abrogate (repeal), invalidare invalidate, dimettersi resign, abdicare abdicate,
assolvere absolve vs. non-anairetic performatives, such as accuse, consecrate, proclaim, etc. Non-thetic
performativity, on the other hand, concerns speech acts, such as affermare affirm, asserire assert, benedire bless,
salutare greet, ringraziare thank, congratularsi congratulate, deplorare deplore, augurare wish. Within non-thetic
verbs, Conte further distinguishes rethic performative verbs, which designate a rhesis, a discourse, such as affermare
affirm vs. non-thetic non-rhetic performatives, such as ringraziare thank, that do not designate a discourse.
In schematic form shown in Table 1.
Such distinctions provide us with a fine-grained taxonomy for the analysis of most speech acts encountered in legal
documents. However, philosophical reflection, in my opinion, lacks perception of an important characteristic of
speech acts: their anchoring in a social and cultural framework; subsequently, their capacity to give insights into the
acting and values of a society. Conversely, speech act analysis cannot be conducted without reference to information
about the social and cultural context in which the speech acts are performed: in our case, features of the relevant legal
system, the social status of speaker/writer and addressee, issues of power and politeness. This is already apparent from
the first paper in this special issue, Charnock’s Overruling as a speech act: The speech act of ‘overruling’ can be
classified as ‘thetic anairetic’ in Conte’s classification above, as it ‘undoes’ extant legislation. Yet the detailed
examination of over a hundred cases from UK and US judgments conducted in the article reveals the complexity of the
phenomenon: given the role of judges in the common law and the need for stability, as discussed in detail in the article,
judges are reluctant to overrule, especially in the UK; this is reflected in the language used to change the law: because
of the general reluctance to overrule authoritative precedents, English judges usually prefer to avoid stating explicitly
that a case has been overruled; they prefer a variety of more indirect, often picturesque expressions having essentially

Table 1
Tetrad of performatives (Conte, 2002:70)
398 Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400

the same function. Thus, rather than rejecting, or explicitly overruling earlier rules, for example, they commonly admit
only to ‘‘departing from’’ them and minimise the scope of the decision by claiming to overrule only particular aspects
of the inconvenient precedent, as in the example:

7. ‘‘The proper exercise of the judicial function requires this House now to depart from Anns in so far as it
affirmed a private law duty of care.’’ (Murphy v Brentwood 1990, per Mackay LC [Charnock this volume]).

Unexpectedly, the more significant the decision, the more implicit the form of expression, as in the Brown v Board
of Education of Topeka (1954), perhaps the most important case decided by the US Supreme Court during the 20th
century. In a unanimous opinion, the court held that racial segregation was unconstitutional. This was in direct
contradiction to the ‘‘separate but equal’’ doctrine, accepted as constitutional in Plessy v Ferguson as long ago as 1896.
Through his use of indirect language, Chief Justice Warren seems to have minimised the scope of the overruling
decision, perhaps because he was concerned to ensure unanimity:

8. ‘‘We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘‘separate but equal’’ has no place [. . .].
Any language in Plessy v Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.’’ (Brown v Board of Education of
Topeka 1954, per Warren CJ [Charnock this volume]).

‘‘Yet the entire purpose of the finding’’, states Charnock, ‘‘was to reject the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine as defined
in Plessy. The new principle was not limited to education but was immediately applied in all fields. It is still considered
as an emblematic case for the civil rights movement’’.
The need for an anchoring in a precise historical and social context motivates the second choice underlying the
papers in the present issue: the adoption of a diachronic perspective.

2. Diachronic speech act analysis

‘‘Even though it is true that many prototypical speech acts seem to consist of single sentences dreamed up by
philosophers in ivory towers, and thus may present an idealised vision of how speakers accomplish acts like
requesting or promising, the work of speech act theorists based on such isolated sentences has proved
enormously insightful, even if their data are somewhat artificial (Tiersma, 1998:137).
The adoption of a historical perspective is useful to the pragmaticist insofar as it sheds new light on a phenomenon
that, with some exceptions, had been investigated in an abstract perspective, far from real data in real time.
Three main questions are addressed by the papers in this special issue: (i) whether pragmatic aspects of language
work uniformly in different periods of time; (ii) the relationship between orality and written recording, often
interfering with the rendition of speech act formulae; (iii) the ritualistic component of legal speech acts. Such
questions are discussed and documented in legal documents belonging to different genres (court trials, indictments,
depositions, law codes) from different cultures and societies (Early Modern English, Contemporary English, Medieval
Slavonic), thus providing insights into the pragmalinguistic realization of specific speech acts and the institutional and
social settings in which they were performed: for instance, the degree of power linked to the use of performative
utterances (cf. Doty and Hiltunen’s and Kryk-Kastovsky’ papers) and indirect speech acts (cf. Collins’ paper).
The first issue, whether pragmatic aspects of language work uniformely in different periods, is the focus of Daniel
Collins’s paper on Indirectness in Legal Speech Acts: An Argument against the Out of Ritual Hypothesis. Here Collins
addresses Marcel Bax’s assumption that linguistic competence at a relatively recent stage differed from the modern
one due to cognitive rather than cultural factors. If confirmed, Bax’s hypothesis would challenge the ‘‘Uniformitarian
Principle’’, i.e. the assumption, underlying research in historical pragmatics, that certain fundamentals of cognition
and communication remain constant through changes in culture and social institutions (cf. Kryk-Kastovsky in this
volume and references therein). Looking at the expression of indirect meanings in Medieval Russian law codices, as
well as at speech acts recorded in other premodern languages, Collins provides empirical counterevidence to the claim
that pragmatic indirectness is an early modern development. Evidence is provided in favour of the claim that the
capacity to express illocutionary meaning indirectly is a pragmatic universal. In discussing the history of indirect
language use, he argues, a careful distinction has to be drawn between true cognitive shifts – that is evolution of the
language capacity – and changes in genres that have a sociocultural motivation. Medieval East Slavic law codes and
 Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 393–400 399

comparable statutes in other premodern and modern languages, for instance, reflect a highly complex structure of
conveying both direct and indirect meaning. Interestingly, the use of indirect locutions in medieval Russian legal texts
increases in proportion to the power of the legislator.
The issue of the theoretical foundations of diachronic speech act analysis is taken up in Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky’s
paper on Speech acts in Early Modern English court trials. After discussing a set of methodological questions related
to the nature of the data (cf. also Jucker and Taavitsainen, 2000:69; Traugott and Dasher, 2002:195–201), Kryk-
Kastovsky addresses the issue of the degree of orality preserved in trial records, which is shown to effect the rendition
of speech act formulae used in court to express the intended illocutionary acts and their corresponding perlocutionary
effects. Such an investigation is particularly revealing, as it documents the shift from recording to actually performing
socially binding acts against the background of the increasing importance of the written record in legal transactions (cf.
Danet and Bogoch, 1994; Tiersma, 2007). As noted by Traugott and Dasher (2002:198) among others: ‘‘we cannot
ignore the fact that one of the major cultural changes that has affected the meaning and lexical resources for speech
acting is unquestionably writing’’. Kryk-Kastovsky’s study of complex discourse combinations consisting of
interrelated illocutions and their corresponding perlocutions, which she calls ‘speech act networks’, confirms the
dialectic between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic factors. On the one hand, the use of performative formulae
reveals the richness of trial records as a source of socio-pragmatic and historical information; on the other, knowledge
of both the institutional, socio-cultural and historical context and the technicalities characteristic of the production of
the genre are essential to identify the main illocutionary acts used and their performative functions.
A fine-grained textual analysis is also a prerequisite in Kathleen Doty and Risto Hiltunen’s paper on Formulaic
discourse and speech acts in the witchcraft trial records of Salem. Here the authors look at the interplay of form and
function to pin down how particular speech acts are expressed by means of characteristic formulae in the legal genres
of indictments, depositions and examination records. Indictments, for instance, can be segmented into prefabricated
set formulations, having their individual and distinct phraseology. The major speech act of charging is realized in the
form of the performative pr’sents (‘presents’) at the beginning of the text. The content of the charge is conveyed in the
form of the Statement section. For the act of charging to be performed felicitously it is essential that it is performed
completely in agreement with the requirements of the genre. In a strict legal interpretation, failure to reproduce a
formula correctly, let alone missing an entire phrase, might run the risk of the charge being dropped on formal grounds.
The fact that lexical variations in the wording of the indictments across the whole material are very small is also
indicative of the importance of getting the phrasing of the documents exactly right. The continuum from indictments to
examination records reflects the degree of speech-relatedness between the documents. Indictments represent formal
written legal discourse, while the examinations recorded in direct discourse supposedly reflect the turns verbatim, as
actually spoken at the trials.
All four papers in this special issue examine speech acts in legal discourse from either a synchronic or diachronic
perspective which highlights essential theoretical concepts: performativity, indirection, contextual constraints, orality
and its interactions with written genres of legal language. The cross-linguistic, cross-cultural span of the data
investigated adds further insights into the debated question of the historical and cultural variation of speech acts
(cf. e.g. Sbisà, 2006:503).

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Trosborg, Anna, 1994. Acts in contracts: some guidelines for translation. In: Snell-Hornby, et al. (Eds.), Translation Studies. An Interdiscipline.
Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 309–318.

Further reading

Spiegelberg, Herbert, 1935. Gesetz und Sittengesetz. Strukturanalytische und Historische Vorstudien zu einer Gesetzfreien Ethik. Niehans, Zurich.

Jacqueline Visconti
Dipartimento di Italianistica e Romanistica,
University of Genoa,
Via Balbi 6, 16126 Genoa, Italy
E-mail address: j.visconti@unige.it

23 May 2008