HXE 319

Speech Acts
 Speech Acts
❑ Consider the proverb below.
➢ ‘Actions speak louder than words.’
❑ The alleged distinction between acts and speech is a misleading
oversimplification.
❑ Speech is action, and language can actually be used to do things.
❑ Quite contrary to the popular belief that actions and words are
entirely distinct, many actions can actually be performed with
words.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
❑ When a speaker makes an utterance including a referring
expression in acceptable circumstances, he performs a specific act,
an act of referring. Referring is primarily a verbal act, but language
can be used to perform a wide range of other tasks. Consider the
following example.
➢ Simon is in the kitchen.
❑ The assertion means that in the real world, a situation exists in
which a person named Simon is in a room identified by the referring
expression the kitchen.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
❑ This assertion does not only describe the current state of affairs in the world, as
the DESCRIPTIVE FALLACY view contends; rather, it has a deeper basic
purpose.
❑ Consider the assertions below.
❖ There is a wasp in your left ear.
❖ Someone has broken the space bar on my typewriter.
❖ This gun is loaded.
❖ You are a fool.
❖ I love you.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
❑ Not only do assertive utterances describe some state of affairs, but they also carry
out acts. This is the contrast between performative utterances (and sentences) and
constative utterances (and sentences).
❑ A PERFORMATIVE utterance is one that actually describes the act that it performs,
that is, it PERFORMS some act and SIMULTANEOUSLY DESCRIBES that act
(Hurford & Heasley, 1994).
✓ E.g., I promise to repay you tomorrow.
❑ It is performative because the speaker does the action described by the utterance,
i.e., he promises to repay the hearer the next day. In other words, the expression
both describes and makes a promise.
✓ Now, consider: John promised to repay me tomorrow.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)

❑ Examples of speech acts:

❖ Request
❖ Apology
❖ Complaint
❖ Invitation
❖ Promise
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
❑ In contrast with a PERFORMATIVE utterance, a
CONSTATIVE utterance is one which makes an ASSERTION.
➢ It is often the utterance of a declarative sentence but NOT
performative.
o E.g., I’m trying to get this box open with a screwdriver.
❑ It asserts a certain state of affairs but is not
performative, i.e., it does not simultaneously describe and
perform the same act.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
❖ Consider Hurford and Heasley’s (1994) examples below.
▪ I name this ship Hibernia. (P)
▪ I admit I was hasty. (P)
▪ I hereby inform you that you are sacked. (P)
▪ I believe in the dictatorship of the Proletariat. (C)
▪ I think I was wrong. (C)
▪ I give you supper every night. (C)
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
❖ Following Austin (1962), we can distinguish three things
in every speech act. That is, the action performed by
producing an utterance consists of three related acts:
1. Locutionary act
2. Illocutionary act
3. Perlocutionary act
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
1. Locutionary act
✓ Producing meaningful linguistic expressions (Yule, 1996)
✓ The saying of something which is meaningful and can be understood
(Richards, 1997)
➢ E.g., Shoot the snake.
➢ It is a locutionary act if the hearers understand the words shoot, the,
and snake, and can identify the snake referred to.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
2. Illocutionary act
✓ An illocutionary act is performed via the communication force of
utterance (Yule, 1996).
✓ An illocutionary act is using a sentence to perform a function
(Richards, 1997).
➢ E.g. Shoot the snake
➢ It is an illocutionary act if it functions as an order or a piece of advice.
 Speech Acts (Cont.)
2. Perlocutionary act
✓ A perlocutionary act is the results or effects that are produced by means of saying
something (Richards, 1997).
➢ E.g., Shoot the snake.
➢ It is a perlocutionary act if it causes other people to shoot the snake.
➢ In a perlocutionary act, the utterance will cause a certain effect on the hearer and
others.
➢ E.g., There’s a wasp in your left ear.
➢ This utterance will cause the hearer to do something (Hurford and Heasley, 1994).
 Conversational Implicature
❑ Conversational implicature is a concept of utterance
meaning as opposed to sentence meaning but is parallel
in many ways to the sense relation (i.e., sentence
meaning concept) of entailment.
❑ Implicature is not a form of inference that can be
predicted solely from a knowledge of the system of sense
relations between sentences.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)
❑ Entailment
▪ Entailment is based firmly on the notion of truth.
▪ If, when a proposition A is TRUE, a proposition B must therefore also be TRUE,
then proposition A ENTAILS proposition B (Hurford and Heasley, 1994).
▪ E.g.,
a) The ladder is too short to reach the roof.
b) The ladder isn’t long enough to reach the roof.
❑ Assuming the same ladder and roof, the truth of a) entails the truth of b).
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)
❑ Entailment
▪ The entailment relationship between sentences is different
from the other, more general notion of inference.
▪ An INFERENCE is any conclusion that one is reasonably
entitled to draw from a sentence or utterance.
▪ All entailments are inferences, but not all inferences are
entailments. Implicature is another kind of inference.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)
❑ Consider the following examples:
a) If a mother asks her son whether he has done his homework and brushed
his teeth, and he replies ‘I’ve done my homework’ would it be reasonable
for his mother to conclude that he hadn’t brushed his teeth?
b) Does I’ve done my homework entail I haven’t brushed my teeth?
❑ The answer to a) would be a ‘yes’, but ‘I’ve done my homework’ does not
entail ‘I haven’t brushed my teeth.’
❑ These are examples of (conversational) implicature. Such examples
involved conclusions drawn from utterances on particular occasions and
not from isolated sentences.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)
❑ How does a hearer make reasonable inferences from an utterance when
the actual sentence uttered does not in fact entail some of the inferences
he or she makes?
❑ Being cooperative in conversation certainly involves more than just
telling the truth, although truthfulness is part of cooperation.
❑ The Co-operative Principle can be stated simply as ‘be as helpful to your
hearer as you can’. The fact that speakers are assumed to follow this
principle is used by hearers in making inferences from the utterances
they hear.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)

❑ Components or principles of conversational

cooperativeness:
1. Relevance – keep to the topic of the conversation.
2. Informativeness – tell the hearer just what he needs to
know, no more and no less.
3. Clarity – speak in a way that the hearer will understand.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)
❑ According to Grice, interpreting utterances is not a matter of
decoding messages, but rather involves:
1. taking the meaning of the sentences together with contextual information,
2. using inference rules
3. working out what the speaker means on the basis of the assumption that
the utterance conforms to the maxims.
❑ The main advantage of this approach from Grice’s point of view is that it
provides a pragmatic explanation for a wide range of phenomena, especially
for conversational implicatures --- a kind of extra meaning that is not literally
contained in the utterance.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)

❑ Grice argues that there are two ways for a

speaker to produce an implicature in conversation:
either by strictly and directly observing the maxims
or by deliberately and openly flouting them.
➢ Speakers can produce implicatures in two ways:
observance and non-observance of the maxims.
 Conversational Implicature (Cont.)
❑ Consider the examples below:
E.g., Husband: Where are the car keys?
Wife: They’re on the table in the hall.
❑ In this example, the wife’s response seamlessly observes all
the maxims. She has answered the question “clearly (Manner)
truthfully (Quality), has given just the right amount of
information (Quantity) and has directly addressed her
husband's goal in asking the question (Relation)” (Thomas,
2014, p. 64).
 Conversational Implicature
E.g., He is a tiger.
❑ This utterance is literally false and goes openly against the
maxim of quality because no man is a tiger.
❑ The hearer still assumes that the speaker is cooperating and
infers that he is trying to express something other than the
literal meaning. He can then find out that perhaps the speaker
meant to say that “he has some characteristics of a tiger”.