Speech Acts and Other Topics in

Pragmatics 1st Edition Marina Sbisà

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/speech-acts-and-other-topics-in-pragmatics-1st-editio
n-marina-sbisa/
Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics
in Pragmatics
Essays on Speech Acts
and Other Topics in
Pragmatics
MARINA SBISÀ
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Marina Sbisà 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951821
ISBN 978–0–19–284412–5
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844125.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

Preface vii
Introduction 1
1. On Illocutionary Types 23
2. Speech Acts, Effects, and Responses 43
3. Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition 53
4. Intentions from the Other Side 72
5. Presupposition, Implicature, and Context in Text Understanding 90
6. Illocutionary Force and Degrees of Strength in Language Use 105
7. Speech Acts in Context 129
8. Cognition and Narrativity in Speech Act Sequences 144
9. Two Conceptions of Rationality in Grice’s Theory of Implicature 167
10. How to Read Austin 181
11. Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution 195
12. Illocution and Silencing 212
13. The Austinian Conception of Illocution and Its Implications
for Value Judgments and Social Ontology 219
14. Varieties of Speech Act Norms 231
15. Ways to Be Concerned with Gender in Philosophy 254
16. Assertion among the Speech Acts 267
17. Illocution and Power Imbalance 288

References 307
Index 323
 Preface

This volume collects seventeen papers of mine dealing with speech acts and
related issues of a pragmatic character, covering a range of thirty-six years from
1984 to 2020. The idea and the decision to submit the collection to Oxford
University Press were inspired by Rae Langton, to whom I am extremely grateful.
I am also grateful for advice and support on this project to Claudia Bianchi, Laura
Caponetto, Bianca Cepollaro, and Paolo Labinaz. It was no easy matter to review
my life through its academic products but, in the end, the main lines, motivations,
and outcomes of my approach to speech as action have now emerged with much
greater clarity than before from the numerous separate papers scattered across the
years and around various sites of publication. The papers are ordered by date of
composition.
I have deliberately excluded from the selection papers of a merely introductory
nature, review articles, papers addressed to an Italian readership analysing sam-
ples from texts or conversations in Italian, and works written in collaboration with
other authors. Sixteen of the papers selected, already published in English, were
subject to some editing (especially concerning language, style, and footnotes),
while one paper was translated into English from Italian. Any new footnotes or
additions to the original ones are in square brackets. All references have been
gathered in one list at the end of the volume.
I am grateful to an enormous number of people whom I met in the course of my
career for exchanges of views, discussion, collaboration, encouragement, or help
with the English of my papers. They include: Bruno Ambroise, Anita Avramides,
Elvio Baccarini, Thomas Ballmer, Lynn Baker, Carla Bazzanella, Claudia Bianchi,
Paolo Bouquet, Claudia Caffi, Laura Caponetto, Bianca Cepollaro, Elena Collavin,
François Cooren, Alice Crary, Paolo Fabbri, Giolo Fele, Anita Fetzer, Michel
Fournel, Bruce Fraser, Christopher Gauker, Hans-Johann Glock, Mitch Green,
Sanford Goldberg, William Hanks, Mike Harnish, David Holdcroft, Jennifer
Hornsby, Andreas Kemmerling, Paolo Labinaz, Eric Landowski, Rae Langton,
Paolo Leonardi, Barry Loewer, Diego Marconi, Jacob Mey, Judy Moss, Gabriella
Nuciforo Paoletti, Etsuko Oishi, Herman Parret, Carlo Penco, Snježana Prijć-
Samaržjia, Paola Rodari, François Recanati, Constantine Sandis, Jennifer Saul,
Ken Turner, Achille Varzi, Jef Verschueren, Tim Williamson, Iwona Witczak-
Plisiecka, Maciej Witek, Tomoyuki Yamada, and Igor Žagar (the list should also
include members of my family, but they prefer not to appear).
Among the people who contributed to my formation in early years, I would like
to remember Amedeo G. Conte, Maria-Elisabeth Conte, Carmela Di Lallo Metelli,
viii 

Gaetano Kanizsa, Anthony Kenny, Eugenio Lecaldano, Brian McGuinness, Guido

Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Renzo Piovesan, and James O. Urmson. I am also extremely
grateful to George Wilson and Paul Smolensky and the Departments of
Philosophy, and respectively Cognitive Science of Johns Hopkins University for
jointly hosting me as a Visiting Scholar in Spring 1999, to Brian McLaughlin and
the Department of Philosophy of Rutgers University for hosting me as a Visiting
Scholar in Fall 2002, to Magdalen College, Oxford, for hosting me as a Visiting
Fellow in Hilary Term 2006, to Sandra Laugier and Bruno Ambroise for inviting
me as a Visiting Professor at the University of Amiens and at CURAPP (CNRS)
(France) in May 2010, to the Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University for hosting
me as an Academic Visitor on various occasions between 2008 and 2017, and to
New College, Oxford, for hosting me as a Visiting Fellow on the sponsorship of
Timothy Williamson in Trinity Term 2019.
 Introduction

The essays collected in this volume examine the categories of speech act theory
and apply and develop them in the context of natural discourse and conversation,
with the purpose of providing an accurate analysis of how speech can be action.
Particular attention is paid to normative aspects of language and language use,
with an eye to understanding the social and political dimensions of linguistic
activity. Issues concerning implicitness are also considered in the same light.
In Section 1 of this Introduction, I shall briefly introduce my approach to
speech acts and to implicitness. In Section 2, I introduce the contents of the essays
collected here and the contributions they make to speech act theory or neighbor-
ing pragmatic issues. Since the collection ranges over different stages in the
development of my views, Section 3 will be devoted to providing some narrative
background: how my thoughts were formed, what voices influenced them, and
how each essay fits in the general context of my research activities. Section 4
provides some details about my current views as they have evolved as a result of
the research activity that this collection of essays attests to.

1. The Approach

My approach to speech acts is inspired by the philosophy of language of John

L. Austin. The central core of my work is the reflection on the nature of illocution,
accompanied by the investigation of how illocution works in naturally produced
speech. Austin’s conception of illocution goes beyond the received idea that
language serves various functions by identifying one kind of thing that is done
in speaking, illocution, and distinguishing it from speech itself on the one hand,
and the goals to which linguistic activity is directed on the other. It is also
innovative because it does not perpetuate the usual opposition between speech
acts performed in uttering declarative sentences and other speech acts, but
instead aims to throw light on the fact that utterances of any kind may embody
an illocution.
I follow Austin in taking illocutionary acts to be “conventional.” By this, I mean
above all that the effects they bring about are conventional: they are not the output
of a chain of causes, which, once they are the case, cannot be “undone” (or made
never to have been the case), but rather states of affairs that obtain depending on
social or interpersonal agreement about the speaker’s performance and the norms

Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics. Marina Sbisà, Oxford University Press. © Marina Sbisà 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844125.003.0001
2 

governing it, and are annulled if the speaker’s performance is found to be defective
in certain ways. This idea of the conventionality of illocution fits with Austin’s
claim that speakers, in order to make their illocutionary acts “take effect,” must
“secure” the audience’s uptake (1975, 116–17).
I describe illocutionary effects in terms of attributions or cancellations of
deontic properties to and from the participants in an interactional event. By
“deontic” properties I mean such properties as having a right, being entitled or
having the authority to do something, having to do something (because obliged
or legitimately expected to do so, or committed to doing so), and being recognized
as capable of doing something or knowledgeable about something. These proper-
ties belong to agents in virtue of social or interpersonal agreement.
This kind of description of illocutionary effects represents participants in a
linguistic exchange as having at any given time a certain set of deontic properties
on the basis of which they perform speech acts and which is altered by the speech
acts they perform. This is similar, on the one hand, to the “modal competence” of
narrative semiotics (Greimas and Courtés 1979, 54) which each actant must be
assigned at each step of a narrative and which changes as the narrative proceeds
and, on the other, to David Lewis’s “scorekeeping” associated with each partici-
pant in a language game, which varies depending on the moves they make (Lewis
1979). My idea differs from both “modal competence” and “scorekeeping”
because, while they take into consideration a mixture of deontic modalities and
various other attitudes, I focus on the sub-set of deontic properties which are
assigned to agents or withdrawn from them in a conventional and defeasible way
(changes in attitudes such as desire or belief, instead, are matters of fact pertaining
to individual or social psychology).
The participants in an event of verbal interaction are usually assumed to be
speaker and hearer (or audience), but according to my analysis, further distinc-
tions must be introduced in order to account for the different roles that speakers
and audience, or members of the audience, play in the dynamics of illocution.
Speakers are responsible for the illocutionary effects of their utterances, but the
illocutionary effect itself does not merely affect one target participant: it affects a
relationship, since to any change in the deontic properties of one of the partici-
pants, there corresponds another change in the deontic properties of another
(including the participant who is also responsible for the illocutionary act).
Representing participants in an interactional event as endowed with deontic
properties, and their sets of deontic properties as changing over time as an effect
of the linguistic exchange, enables us to realize how illocution contributes to
forming and modifying interpersonal and social relations, including power
relations.
I agree with the tradition (not only Austin but also Grice and Strawson) that the
performance of an illocutionary act must be recognizable as such. But since I also
take it that illocutionary effects are brought about thanks to social or interpersonal
  3

agreement, I assign an important role to how an utterance is received and

responded to. In ways and to an extent depending on the nature and structure
of the interactional event in which an utterance is framed, the uptake of the
relevant participants establishes, or contributes to establishing, what illocutionary
act was performed.
About infelicities, I maintain that attempts at performing illocutionary acts may
fail if the circumstances are inappropriate or the execution is gravely flawed, while
utterances achieve their illocutionary effect if the infelicity consists merely in the
absence of the appropriate psychological states of the speaker. However, I do not
take felicity to be a matter of complying with necessary and sufficient conditions:
when it is clear enough what an illocutionary act an utterance is designed to
perform, it is assumed by default, that is, unless there is reason to suspect that
some circumstance is inappropriate or there is some flaw in the execution or that
the speaker lacks the appropriate psychological states.
Illocutionary acts, so conceived, should be classified according to the effects
they produce or more precisely, according to the whole configuration of deontic
properties in which their preconditions and their effects consist. Four out of five of
Austin’s classes of illocutionary acts are suitable for being characterized in this
way. So, in my theoretical considerations about illocution as well as in my use of
illocution in the analysis of discourse or conversation, I highlight four main
illocutionary types, corresponding to my re-definitions of the Austinian classes
of Verdictives, Exercitives, Commissives, and Behabitives. In Austin’s class of
Expositives, various configurations of deontic properties can be found, while the
contents of those deontic properties concern matters related to the structure and
development of discourse or conversation. So, it is possible to identify a group of
Expositives within each of the four main classes of Verdictives, Exercitives,
Commissives, and Behabitives.
Speech acts are usually considered as a special, self-contained topic in prag-
matics and not as a theme whose in-depth treatment can shed light on other
issues. In fact, how speech acts are conceived is often influenced by the ways in
which issues such as presupposition and common ground or, respectively, impli-
cature and relevance-driven inferences, are dealt with. But my way with speech
acts has implications for how to deal with issues concerning implicitness. If
implicitness is viewed as a phenomenon concerning the speech act (at some
level or other), it becomes natural to inquire about the functions it serves with
respect to what the speaker is doing with their words. In particular, suggestions
about when and why speech acts convey certain kinds of implicit content may
come from the investigation of the dynamics of illocution. If not only illocutionary
felicity but also the appropriateness of utterances and the participants’ coopera-
tivity are assumed by default (that is, unless there are reasons not to do so), this
may be used to account for both so-called presupposition accommodation and the
working out of conversational implicature.
4 

My main idea about presupposition is that it is misleading to give two distinct

accounts of speaker presupposition and presupposition accommodation. As acti-
vated by a speech act (or also, by a text comprising various speech acts), presup-
position should be recognized as one and the same phenomenon whether the
presupposed content is already shared or not. This is made possible by consider-
ing presuppositions not as shared assumptions, but as assumptions which ought
to be shared. The speech act requires the assumption that things are in a certain
way to be true for its own appropriateness or felicity, irrespective of whether we
accommodate that assumption or already know that things are so. This view of
presupposition accounts for its informative and persuasive functions as well as for
the cases in which the content that is linguistically marked as presupposed is already
part of the common ground. Presuppositions encode content that may be new for at
least some members of the audience in a syntactically compact and therefore
economic way and help the speaker avoid the (face-threatening) implication that
no one in the audience already possesses that information. Presuppositions make
the addressee of a speech act feel they are a member of the group as soon as they
share, or accept to accommodate, the presupposed assumptions. The fact that
challenging presuppositions is costly, both cognitively and interactionally, explains
why they are suitable for conveying content that the speaker does not want to be
challenged and may be exploited as a powerful means of persuasion.
As to implicature, I consider it from the point of view of the audience.
I therefore focus on why it is legitimate to understand the speaker’s utterance as
having a certain implicature and how the implicated content can be retrieved.
Implicature makes additional or redressive information available to the audience.
It backgrounds the speaker’s commitment to the content made available and
involves the audience in the process of working it out, thus fostering a sort of
complicity between speaker and audience.
I distinguish presupposition from implicature by two main criteria inspired by
the ways in which their contents are made explicit and by the functions they have
with respect to the overall significance of a text. In the explicitation of an
implicature, we infer a content that is not expressed on the text’s surface; in the
explicitation of a presupposition, we reformulate and foreground content which is
already present in the text in a backgrounded form. Likewise, a content cannot be
(merely) made available by implicature when it is explicitly affirmed, while
content linguistically marked as presupposed can be at the same time spelled
out explicitly while still conserving the status of presupposed information.

2. The Essays

In Essay 1, “On Illocutionary Types” (published in Journal of Pragmatics, 1984),

I examine the classification of illocutionary acts outlined by John L. Austin and
  5

elaborate upon it. I reconsider Austin’s four classes of Exercitives, Commissives,

Verdictives, and Behabitives and characterize them as involving distinct types of
conventional effect on the interactional relation. These types of effect are
described in terms of assignment or cancellation of deontic predicates to or
from the participants and to the purpose of this description, the participants are
considered in terms of the “actants” they express, borrowing this notion from
narrative semiotics. Illocution is thus presented not as a matter of a speaker
achieving an effect on the audience, but of a Destinator assigning or withdrawing
deontic properties to or from each one of two Destinees, thus affecting their
relation.
Shortly (and approximately) said, in Exercitives, Commissives, and Verdictives,
the Destinator has a deontic property of the “can” kind (amounting to some kind
of authority, recognized capacity, or recognized competence), while in Behabitives
the Destinator fulfills the task of reacting to some action, event, or situation and
has therefore a deontic property of the “ought” kind. The relationship between
Destinee 1 and Destinee 2 is changed by Exercitives by creating or eliminating
obligations and by Commissives by assigning a right or legitimate expectation to
Destinee 1 and an obligation to Destinee 2. Both Verdictives and Behabitives
entitle Destinee 1 to possess knowledge, but in the case of Verdictives, it is the
knowledge formulated in the speech act and Destinee 2 is assigned the obligation
to guarantee for it, while in the case of Behabitives, it is the Destinator’s reaction
itself which becomes an object of knowledge for Destinee 1, while Destinee 2 is
freed from previous obligations as regards Destinee 1, so that their relation can
have a new start.
Austin’s illocutionary classes overlap with one another and have fuzzy borders.
I claim that this is not a weakness, but a strong point of his classification (or
typology), since it enables us to tackle various complexities in the analysis of both
illocutionary verbs and the illocutionary force of utterance tokens. Likewise,
distinguishing illocutionary types in the way I propose is not pidgeon-holing
existing practices, but outlining a flexible descriptive mechanism, capable to
account for marginal and hybrid cases as well as prototypical ones. I conclude
Essay 1 with an invitation to use the typology it presents as a point of departure for
further analyses, cast in the form of the proposal of some speech-act theoretical
“games” one might want to play with it: grouping types according to similarities,
shifting a kind of illocutionary act or the illocutionary force of a token utterance
from a type to another, reframing the illocutionary act performed in issuing a
token utterance within a group of illocutionary types to which it would not be
expected to belong.
Essay 2, “Speech Acts, Effects, and Responses,” written as a reaction to John
Searle’s paper “Conversation” and published in a collection discussing it (Searle
et al. 1992, 7–29), examines the relationship between individual speech acts and
conversational sequences. In it, I claim that instead of inquiring whether one can
6 

extend speech act theory (with the received apparatus of felicity conditions) to the
study of conversation, one should consider that the study of speech acts already
presupposes some reference to conversational sequences. Reading Austin as
claiming that the hearer’s uptake is necessary for an illocutionary act to take
effect, I suggest that the response to a speech act, which manifests how the
interlocutor understood it, contributes to letting that speech act take effect
according to a certain illocutionary force. While admitting that there are cases
in which a response that is inappropriate to the apparent force of a speech act can
be dismissed as due to misunderstanding, I argue that in the course of informal
conversations, the response that a speech act actually receives often reveals how it
was taken and what illocutionary effect it brought about. So, in order to tell what
an illocutionary act is performed in issuing an utterance, we should not consider
that utterance in isolation, but frame it within the conversational sequence to
which it belongs.
In Essay 3, “Ideology and the Persuasive Use of Presupposition,” first presented
at the 6th International Pragmatics Conference (1998), whose special topic was
“Language and Ideology,” I show how presupposition is used to convey new
information and even to achieve persuasion (especially in fields pertaining to
ideology), by discussing examples drawn from political news in Italian daily
newspapers. I challenge the received account of pragmatic presupposition as
unable to yield a plausible explanation of these phenomena, and argue that
presupposition and presupposition accommodation should not be given two
separate accounts: instead, presupposition should be recognized as one and the
same phenomenon, irrespective of whether the presupposed content is already
shared or new. I propose to consider presuppositions not as shared assumptions,
but as assumptions which ought to be shared. This normative feature helps
account for their informative and persuasive uses. Against the risks of uncritical
persuasion, I also claim, the first defense lies in the ability to make presuppositions
explicit, turning them into assertions or assessments that, being openly per-
formed, do not escape conscious control and are liable to criticism.
Essay 4, “Intentions from the Other Side,” read at the Conference “Paul Grice’s
Heritage” (S. Marino, International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies,
1998), revisits Paul Grice’s philosophy of language. It examines three Gricean
ideas: non-natural meaning, the Cooperative Principle, and the notion of a person
that Grice puts forward in the context of his theory of value. My approach to those
ideas does not focus on the speaker’s mind and its internal states, but on the
audience and how they should take the speaker’s utterances. Viewing non-natural
meaning “from the other side” (as the title of Essay 4 reads) amounts to reformu-
lating its Gricean definition as spelling out what intentions the audience should
attribute to a speaker when considering that speaker as non-naturally meaning
something. Likewise, the Cooperative Principle and its maxims are no rules that
must be actually followed by speakers, but assumptions in the light of which the
  7

audience can best understand speakers and which speakers may exploit to make
themselves understood. So, some traditional objections to Grice’s definition of
non-natural meaning turn out to be harmless and the use of the Cooperative
Principle in the analysis of discourse is fully justified. As to Grice’s notion of a
person as the essentially rational being (1991), such an essence of personhood is
an object of self-attribution by human beings and its borders are fuzzy: as one
would expect from an essence that is (so to speak) essentially attributed, there will
always be borderline cases, in which it is unclear whether the attribution is due or
not. I take this as confirming my intuition that there is an ethical burden implicit
in the recognition of others as subjects.
In Essay 5, “Presupposition, Implicature, and Context in Text Understanding,”
read at a Conference of the international interdisciplinary network “Context” held
in Trento in 1999, I sketch an overview of the field of implicitness which has its
roots in my Austin-inspired speech-act theoretical perspective. I examine the roles
that presupposition and implicature play in the process of text understanding.
Context is part of the picture in two ways: as the objective and mind-transcendent
context to which linguistically indicated presuppositions have to conform (and are
by default taken as conforming to) and as the representation of context whose
construction and update are part of the process of text understanding. I describe
presupposition and implicature as two different ways in which changes in the
representation of the context are induced, both different from the way in which
assertion changes it. On the basis of this description, I claim that there are good
reasons to consider presupposition and implicature as distinct linguistic-
pragmatic phenomena. Indeed, a linguistically activated presupposition remains
such even if its content has already been asserted, while the previous assertion of
the same context makes an implicature useless and therefore prevents it from
arising.
Essay 6, “Illocutionary Force and Degrees of Strength in Language Use” was
also written in 1999, with the intent of drawing my own conclusions—after
conducting further research on my own into speech acts in conversation—from
my previous collaboration with Claudia Caffi and Carla Bazzanella on mitigation
and reinforcement (see Bazzanella, Caffi, and Sbisà 1991). I felt uneasy about some
of the results of that joint research, especially as to its taking “propositions” as one
of the aspects of the speech act whose modifications contribute to variations in
what we called the “degree of strength” of illocutionary force (following Searle’s
terminology: Searle 1979, 5; Searle and Vanderveken 1985). The main idea in
Essay 6 is that those variations affect aspects of the illocutionary effect and of its
preconditions, both of which consist in deontic properties of the participants.
Analysts do not face two phenomena, illocutionary force (or illocutionary point)
on the one hand, and mitigation/reinforcement on the other, but have only the
(multi-faceted) task of describing the dynamics of illocution in its shades
(both qualitative and quantitative) and its relations to the locutionary and
8 

perlocutionary aspects of the speech act. In support of the claim that mitigation
and reinforcement are adjustments of the illocutionary effects of utterances,
I analyze examples from recorded conversations in Italian. The paper was sub-
mitted to the Journal of Pragmatics and was accepted after lengthy and instructive
discussions.
Essay 7, “Speech Acts in Context,” written in 2000, examines the notion of
context and its uses in speech act theory. I claim that the requirements for the
felicity of performative utterances discussed by Austin have to be satisfied by how
things are objectively, while Searle’s felicity conditions are mostly requirements on
the speaker’s intentions and other attitudes. I then argue in favor of a view of the
context of a speech act as constructed (therefore, potentially dynamic) as opposed
to merely given, limited as opposed to indefinitely extendable, and (insofar as the
speech act has to be assessed against it) objective as opposed to cognitive. I also
reaffirm the context-changing role of speech acts and the difference between the
illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions of the changes they bring about.
In Essay 8, “Cognition and Narrativity in Speech Act Sequences,” read at the
7th International Pragmatics Conference (2000), I examine the interactional
dynamics of speech acts, making an extensive use of examples from natural
conversations and paying particular attention to speech act sequences. I develop
some of the insights about the hearer’s uptake that were already present in Essays
1 and 2, arguing that what is constitutive of the audience’s uptake (and therefore
contributes to making the speaker’s utterance illocutionarily effective) are the
audience’s verbal and behavioral responses as opposed to their cognitive repre-
sentation of what the speaker meant. I then show how the analysis of action
sequences put forward by narrative semiotics, which envisages a three-place
structure (the narrative schema) consisting of a manipulating move, an action,
and a sanctioning move, can be used to obtain a better understanding of what is
going on in a speech act sequence, shedding light on the sequential relations
between speech acts. I also demonstrate that the narrative schema can be applied
to the same conversational sequences in different positions, revealing a variety of
possible sequence-depending aspects for each conversational contribution.
In Essay 9, “Two Conceptions of Rationality in Grice’s Theory of Implicature,”
read at the international conference “Rationality in Belief and Action” held in
Rijeka in 2004, I take another look at Grice’s philosophy of language. I explore
why conversational implicature is considered by Grice, as well as by post-Gricean
and neo-Gricean scholars, as something “rational” and show that two distinct
conceptions of rationality, “instrumental” and “argumentative,” co-exist in Grice’s
thought. The “instrumental” rationality of conversational implicature is based
on the efficacy of the Cooperative Principle in maximizing understanding: conver-
sational implicature is rational in this sense because conversation is more efficient if
the Cooperative Principle is assumed to hold. “Argumentative” rationality, on the
other hand, is a matter of having reasons for what one says or does: if we focus on
  9

it, conversational implicature is rational because it is calculable, that is, retrievable

by reasoning in accordance with a certain argumentative path. While post- and
neo-Gricean theories (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Levinson 2000) focus on instru-
mental rationality, Grice’s posthumous writings on value and reason (1991, 2001)
pay attention to argumentative rationality. I argue that conversational implicature
is best understood in the light of the argumentative conception of rationality.
Essay 10, “How to Read Austin,” originally read as a plenary lecture at the
9th International Pragmatics Conference (2005), special topic “Pragmatics and
Philosophy,” reassesses the contributions to pragmatics made by John L. Austin’s
How to Do Things with Words. I discuss some of the assumptions made by the
received readings of that volume, concerning its aim and structure, the role of the
performative/constative dichotomy, the conceptions of illocution and perlocution,
and the alleged exclusion of non-seriousness. I argue that the volume is structured
as a proof by contradiction of the claim that all speech should be considered as
action, that illocution has conventional effects, that perlocution presupposes a
conception of action as responsibility, and that Austin had reasons to avoid
dealing with non-seriousness on a par with illocution and perlocution. As to the
conventionality of illocution in particular, I claim that illocutionary effects are
conventional insofar as they can be annulled, making the illocutionary act
“undone” (which is something that cannot happen to acts that bring about their
effects by natural causation).
Essay 11, “Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution,” written in 2008 and
published in a speech-act theoretical issue of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, tackles
the issue of the conventionality of illocutionary acts in its relation to the “securing
of uptake.” While the indispensability of the latter is widely accepted as a hallmark
of illocution, it has also been taken as evidence of the intention-based nature of
illocutionary acts as opposed to their conventionality. I question the reading of
the securing of uptake offered by Strawson (1964), who considers the audience’s
uptake as the only effect proper to all illocutionary acts. Strawson, I claim, is right
in seeing a connection between the alleged conventionality of performatives (and
illocution) and the indispensability of the securing of uptake, but incorrectly
identifies the kind of connection. For most (informal) kinds of illocutionary act,
he explains conventionality away as the expression, on the part of the speaker, of
Gricean meaning intentions that must be made recognizable to the hearer. In my
reading of Austin, the securing of uptake is a matter of enabling the hearer to
recognize the procedure that the speaker is executing, and its indispensability is
the hallmark of the conventionality of illocution understood as the illocutionary
act’s “taking effect” (Austin 1975, 117) thanks to the participants’ agreement on
what is being done.
In Essay 12, “Illocution and Silencing,” written in 2008 as a contribution to a
Festschrift for Jacob Mey (the founder of the Journal of Pragmatics), I consider the
problem of how to account for a person’s being “silenced” as it emerges from the
10 

debate on pornography and speech acts initiated by MacKinnon (1987) and

Langton (1993). I consider the case of the ineffective refusal of sexual advances,
distinguishing various ways of explaining what goes wrong (perlocutionary fail-
ure, illocutionary disablement, misfire, lack of uptake, epistemic injustice) and
arguing that none of them provides the complete picture of what is going
on. I propose to analyze sexual refusal as an exercitive illocutionary act and
its silencing as a denial of the woman’s authority over her own body and her
entitlement to autonomous decision.
Essay 13, “The Austinian Conception of Illocution and its Implications for
Value Judgments and Social Ontology,” started out as a contribution to a joint
seminar of the University of Trieste and the University of Bamberg, Germany, on
“Moral Realism and Political Decisions,” held in December 2013. My main aim in
this paper is to explain how to deal with value judgments and social ontology in
my Austin-inspired perspective. After providing a brief account of Austin’s speech
act theory as I read it and some examples of conventional illocutionary effects,
I discuss the implications of Austin’s classification of illocutionary acts for value
judgments, arguing that Austin challenges the fact/value dichotomy by assimilat-
ing statements of fact to value judgments as both members of the class of
Verdictives. Moreover, I argue that illocution gives us an easy path into social
ontology: indeed, many social realities can be described in terms of states of affairs
consisting of the distribution of deontic properties among the social agents
involved and such states of affairs share the same nature as the effects of illocu-
tionary acts. When participants have certain deontic properties, for example a
right or an obligation, that right or that obligation, albeit not by itself institutions,
can be dealt with as socially constituted objects. The deontic properties of social
agents are the material out of which institutions are made, and they come into
being thanks to illocutionary acts. So, in the last resort, it is illocution that serves as
the basic source of social ontology and institutions.
In Essay 14, “Varieties of Speech Act Norms,” written in 2016 as a contribution
to a volume on speech acts and their normativity edited by Maciej Witek and
Iwona Witzak-Plisiecka, I explore various kinds of norms governing speech acts
and their roles in the dynamics of illocution. I distinguish constitutive rules (upon
which the performance of illocutionary acts depends), maxims (based on rational
motivations and encoding regulative advice for optimal speech act performance in
the perspective of the participants), and objective requirements for the overall
correctness of the accomplished speech act. In so doing, I represent the perfor-
mance of an illocutionary act as the execution of a procedure, including an initial
situation, the verbal or non-verbal behavior which is expected on the part of the
performer, and the designed outcome: speech act norms specify parts of a
procedure or other features of the situation associated with it. The proposal to
consider rules of accommodation as a further kind of speech act norm is discussed
and rejected: procedures are structured wholes, and any part of a procedure that
  11

suffices to make the whole recognizable invites the by-default assumption that the
other parts are instantiated as well. I also argue that, among speech act norms,
only the rules I here call “constitutive” are conventional. All speech acts are,
therefore, conventional for certain aspects and non-conventional for others.
Essay 15 was prepared as an invited contribution to the Conference “Methods
of Philosophy,” organized by the University Vita–Salute S. Raffaele (Milan) in
2017. The paper illustrates my understanding of some philosophical ways of
dealing with gender, harking back to my own experience of feminism. I argue
for the philosophical relevance of critiques of gender roles made by means of the
analysis of language and speech. I reflect on the oscillations from the emancipa-
tory perspective to the positive assessment of gender difference and then back
(due to worries with essentialism) to the (mere?) quest for equal rights and
opportunities. I consider the role of generic statements about the characteristics of
genders in fostering essentialism on the one hand, and producing an overrating of
the normativity of gender concepts on the other. I argue that people’s subjectivity
should be recognized by other people (including point of view, attitudes, and
rights) in an unconditional way; that is, with regard to gender, whether they fit a
given gender model or not. By the way, I do not think that agreeing to be called
“he” or “she” should be equated to agreeing to fit the leading model (or any fixed
model, for that matter) of the masculine or feminine gender. Unconditional
recognition of the other’s subjectivity has the power to deconstruct the normativ-
ity of gender concepts without falling back into homologation (that is, denial of
gender- or sex-related differences), which would also be a constraint on identity.
Essay 16, “Assertion among the Speech Acts,” is a contribution to the Oxford
Handbook of Assertion (Goldberg ed. 2020). In it, I discuss how assertion is
collocated among the other speech acts, starting from the assumption that, in
speech-act theoretical terms, assertion is an illocutionary act. I examine how
assertion relates to other illocutionary acts involving the utterance of plain
declarative sentences and how it should be collocated within the whole gamut of
illocutionary acts. While the former exploration relies upon an intuitive grasp of
the family of assertive illocutionary acts, the latter requires a more complete
characterization of assertion in the framework of illocutionary act classification.
Using Austin’s terms, I describe assertion as an expositive Verdictive: an act
involving judgment and allowing for the transfer of knowledge, which affects
discursive and conversational relations. I also argue that from an Austin-inspired
perspective there is no good reason to grant assertion a special place among
illocutionary acts. The challenge lies, rather, in putting assertion on a par with
other kinds of illocutionary act, making the analysis of these throw new light upon
assertion and the other way around.
The contents of Essay 17, “Illocution and Power Imbalance,” came together
gradually and took various forms across a number of lectures and conference
papers read in Italian and English between 2015 and 2019, until the paper was
12 

published in Italian in 2020. My commitment to admit of Exercitives as one of the

main types of illocutionary act dates back to the beginnings of my research on
speech acts (see Essay 1) and characterizes my use of illocution in discourse
analysis (see, e.g., Essay 12 and 2006c).¹ In Essay 17, I describe Exercitives as
consisting of the exercise of authority or prestige and affecting the rights and
obligations of the participants. I focus attention on examples of Exercitives from
informal speech situations, showing how the exercitive force of an utterance is
indicated and what effects it may have on the degree of power of the participants
with respect to each other. Indeed, studying Exercitives involves studying kinds
and degrees of that power which is granted to agents by social or interpersonal
agreement (especially authority, formal and informal), and the ways in which
agents manage or fail to get it, including “back-door” strategies (Langton 2018a)
that involve the accommodation of some kind of authority as the initial condition
of a tacitly accepted exercitive procedure. In this connection, I also discuss a case
in which the characteristic effects of Exercitives are achieved in a back-door
fashion and the audience’s responses attempt to block them. I conclude by arguing
that the problem with Exercitives is not so much that they introduce power
imbalance, but that they can be exploited to make it stable and mono-directional.

3. Some Background

When I first read Austin, it was 1969 and I was reading philosophy at university in
my home town, Trieste. I was looking for recent philosophical work which might
help me understand the human condition at the time—an evergreen aim for a
philosopher, I dare say. I turned to Austin after considering pragmatism, the
Frankfurt school, some phenomenology, and various authors in the analytic and
neo-positivist traditions from Wittgenstein to Ayer and Hare. Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus (1922), translated into Italian in 1964 by Amedeo G. Conte, struck me
with its Silence. I found neo-positivism irritating, its verificationism unconvinc-
ing, and its meta-ethical emotivism upsetting. I found no real way out in meta-
ethical prescriptivism. There was interest for Wittgenstein in Italy in those years,
but without being aware of any particular reason for this choice, I did not feel like
concentrating on his approach (or approaches: it was not clear how many
Wittgensteins there had to be); I was to return to Wittgenstein for about a decade
after 1973. In the Italian environment, there could also be heard echoes of
Ordinary Language Philosophy, particularly thanks to Ferruccio Rossi-Landi
(1961) (who later turned to a peculiar form of Marxist semiotics) and Renzo

¹ References specified only by the year of publication indicate works of mine. Full references to them
can be found under my name in the final list of References.
  13

Piovesan (a highly perceptive thinker and teacher, based in Padova, who

published too little but gave the most in personal discussion).
Austin offered me a way of being philosophically concerned with language that
did not seem to presuppose any metaphysics (thus making me feel I was comply-
ing with Wittgenstein’s Silence) and was promising in at least two directions:
finding a way out of the fact/value dichotomy, and working out an approach to
language and its uses with good chances to prove revealing about human relations
and the cultural and ideological frameworks surrounding them. In the former
direction, I started reflecting on the classification of illocutionary acts, which
according to Austin himself, should be a key to deconstructing the fact/value
dichotomy. But soon, the issue of illocutionary act classification became an object
of research for me in its own right (1972).
In my subsequent work, while never forgetting about the fact/value problem,
I did not return to it in a systematic way (my regret about this is expressed in
2012b; but see also Essay 13). In the latter direction, I soon realized that the idea of
speech as action as outlined by Austin offered some interesting potential for social
and cultural critique. It was summer 1975 and I had just obtained my first
temporary research position at the University of Trieste, when I was invited to
contribute to a local left-wing Festival by giving a talk on the language of women’s
magazines. I began to examine a sample of women’s magazines through the lens of
speech act theory, supplemented with the notion of presupposition. The results
of that research took the form of a paper (1976), which was my first experience of
speech act-oriented discourse analysis. On that occasion, I also started to realize
that in the study of speech acts and more generally in pragmatics (which was then
a new and rapidly expanding research field), there has to be complementarity
between theoretical reflection and empirical exploration of natural speech in its
various forms (oral, written, or whatever they might be). Since then, I have
expressed this conviction on many occasions. I thought of the philosophy of
language not so much as a set of theoretical claims, but as a methodological
framework for the analysis of actual speech (or “text” in the sense of Hjelmslev
1961) (see 1989a, 10). Those were the beginnings of two trends in my research that
are present and intertwined also in this volume: theoretical interest in speech act
theory and fascination with (or commitment to) the task of analyzing discourse
with the tools of philosophical pragmatics. It should be pointed out, however, that
I also had other interests and activities in those early years, all of which con-
tributed to the formation of my views.
I spent the autumn of 1972 in Oxford, collaborating with J. O. Urmson on the
second revised edition of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, then
published as Austin (1975). While in Oxford, I received precious advice from
Brian McGuinness and Anthony Kenny about the short introduction to
Wittgenstein I was planning to write for an Italian publisher (1975). As regards
Wittgenstein, I continued to pay attention to certain themes of his philosophy
14 

until the mid-1980s, forming the conviction that the rejection of metalinguistic
explanations as never-ending and therefore ultimately useless played an important
role in his philosophical development and in the ways in which he attempted to
practice philosophy in a non-metaphysical style (1980, 1981, 1983b, 1984d).
Between 1974 and 1978, I collaborated with Paolo Leonardi on presupposition
(Leonardi and Sbisà 1977, 1978). After studying with Piovesan in Padova,
Leonardi got a grant that enabled him to visit Berkeley and was therefore well
aware of the new trends at the interface between philosophy and linguistics.
Exchanges of ideas with Leonardi continued after that collaboration, even across
the differences between our respective paths in philosophy.
From 1976 onwards, my curiosity about the world of Italian and French
semiotics (Umberto Eco and Paolo Fabbri in Bologna; in Paris, Algirdas
Greimas and his research group, in which Fabbri participated) led me to explore
whether semiotics could offer some way of dealing with meaning other than the
analytic orthodoxy of compositional truth-conditions, of which I was wary. To be
honest, I did not find anything convincing enough to satisfy my quest.
Nevertheless, I found a lot of interesting notions and methods for the analysis
of texts and (given the focus of Greimas’s work on narrativity) of actions too.
I collaborated with Fabbri on a comparison between Searle’s and Austin’s ways of
dealing with speech acts on the one hand, and models of social interaction of a
structuralist and, respectively, interactionist kind on the other (Sbisà and Fabbri
1980). That collaboration influenced me under various respects. Not only did
Fabbri make me appreciate various insights into language, action, and human
interaction coming from semiotics and from the sociology of interaction revisited
with a “semiotic eye” (see Fabbri 1973), but in my discussions with him, I had the
opportunity to make up my mind about the tendency to detach the notion of an
agent (or subject or self) from that of an individual human being and its pros
and cons.
Last but not least, the late 1970s were the heyday of the feminist movement.
I participated in feminist discussion groups from 1974 onwards. Childbirth, which
I experienced in 1973 and again in 1974, appeared to me as having the potential to
unmask a number of mystifications about women: at least, that was its effect on
me. To substantiate my intuitions, of course, I read feminist thinkers, with
particular sympathy for Irigaray (1974). I then started a line of research on
discourse on childbirth and the maternal stereotype, which led to the publication
of a booklet centered on the analysis of implicit communication about gender and
motherhood in the vulgarization of medical advice on pregnancy and birth
(1984c), followed by other studies and publications on neighboring subjects
later on (1988, 1992d, 1996, 1999d, 2017b).
In the 1980s, my main job was reordering and completing my views on
speech acts. I wrote Essay 1 and various other papers in Italian, English, or
French (1983a, 1984b, 1986a, 1987a, 1987b) and then the volume Linguaggio,
  15

ragione, interazione. Per una teoria pragmatica degli atti linguistici (“Language,
Reason, Interaction. Toward a Pragmatic Speech Act Theory”) (1989a). That
volume argues for a speech-act theoretical framework in which illocutionary
acts produce conventional effects (thus developing the outline already sketched
out in Essay 1), taking up ideas from the different fields, authors, and themes I had
experience of, including: Austin, Wittgenstein, speech act theory, context and
context change, narrative semiotics, and Goffman’s sociology of interaction.
I remember I proofread it in hospital, where I was striving to delay the birth of
my fourth child as much as possible, who was about to be born prematurely.
Soon after 1989, I considered and then gave up the project of translating my
book into English. I am grateful to Anthony Kenny for pointing out to me that
some international publishers might be willing to publish its translation. But I felt
unsure to what extent my remarks and arguments would have survived the filter of
translation, I knew I would have to check the translation word by word to avoid
any misunderstandings, and above all I was unwilling to spend any more time on
that text: I really wanted to move on. Moreover, I thought that my views needed to
be tested against analyses of naturally produced speech, particularly conversation.
Only seeing them put to work in that way would make me feel confident enough
about their soundness. I therefore expended my efforts in that direction, and it was
not until later, from around 2000 onwards, that I felt like resuming, reformulating,
discussing more thoroughly, or further developing some of the ideas contained in
my volume on speech act theory (1989a) in papers written in English (see Essays 7,
8, 10, and 11).
In 1990–1, I collaborated with two Italian linguists working on pragmatic
issues, Claudia Caffi and Carla Bazzanella, on the “mitigation” and “reinforce-
ment” of speech acts. The results of the collaboration were published as
Bazzanella, Caffi, and Sbisà (1991). Writing a co-authored paper required nego-
tiation and compromise, but at any rate I continued to reflect upon mitigation and
reinforcement and in 1999 this eventually led me to write Essay 6. The collabo-
ration with Caffi and Bazzanella gave great support to my project to test my
speech-act theoretical framework against analyses of samples of natural conver-
sation. In various papers, often making reference to examples, I investigated the
deontic aspect of illocution, the relationship of illocution to affect, the role of the
hearers’ uptake and of the utterance’s sequential position, and the characteristics
of particular speech act kinds (Essays 2 and 8; 1987b, 1987c, 1989b, 1990, 1992b,
1992c, 1994, 1995b).
In the late 1980s, I also set out to resume a line of enquiry into implicitness,
whose beginnings go back to the observation (made while studying presupposi-
tion in the 1970s) that presuppositions in natural speech are too often new
information for them to be plausibly defined as shared assumptions (1979).
I made this decision when one of my kids, aged 12, asked me to explain a sentence
in his history textbook which he could not understand: in complying with his
16 

request, I realized I was making explicit a great deal of content linguistically

marked as presupposed. Hence the idea that an awareness of implicit content
and how to make it explicit should be part of teachers’ toolkit (first expressed in
Sbisà and Rodari 1989 and later developed in 1991, 1999c, 2007b, 2007c; Sbisà and
Regina 2003). Most of the products of this line of research were published in
Italian, in order to be accessible to Italian teachers and communicators. But I was
also interested in theoretical accounts of the persuasive use of presupposition (that
is, why presuppositions tend to be accommodated, often with long-lasting per-
suasive effects), the difference I felt to exist between presupposition and implica-
ture, and the conditions for attributing an utterance with an implicature (Essays 3,
4, 5, 9; see also 2007c, 2021a). As to implicature, it should be pointed out that
while well aware of the importance of Grice’s philosophy for philosophical
pragmatics (I was the first to bring a xerox copy of his 1967 lectures on “Logic
and Conversation” to Italy in 1972), I found his influence on speech act theory
highly problematic, especially for its repercussions on the conception of illocution.
It is not by chance that my re-reading of Grice and my use of some of his
categories are audience-centered rather than speaker-centered (Essay 4). I found
myself sympathetic with Jennifer Saul’s (2002a) idea that implicature is meaning
made available by the speaker to the audience, which I endorse in Essay 9.
My research on implicitness was accompanied by the critical examination of
the notion of context, in the course of which I benefited from e-mail correspond-
ence and personal discussion with Christopher Gauker and Carlo Penco. I found
Gauker’s work on presupposition and context (1997, 1998) particularly illuminat-
ing. I knew that in the work I was doing on the subject, there was something
basically foreign to mainstream views of presupposition. But I was not well aware
of what was at stake. Gauker’s clear-cut distinction between context as a set of
assumptions that the participants in a conversation share and assume to be
shared, and context as the set of sentences which, if asserted, would objectively
help the participants achieve the goals of their conversation, made me realize that
my account of the informative and persuasive potential of presupposition had to
be connected to the objective, rather than cognitive, nature of the relevant context.
The normative character of presupposition depends, indeed, on the fact that
linguistic form and force indicators pose requirements on the appropriateness of
utterances, which have to be satisfied objectively (so that taking an utterance to be
appropriate commits the audience to grant that its context actually comprises
certain features). The connection between the felicitous performance of speech
acts and the objective character of the context of utterance against which they are
assessed is also emphasized in Essay 7. That paper was read by R. M. Harnish
(2009) as giving an “externalist” picture of speech acts as opposed to the “internalist”
picture provided by the theory he endorsed (Bach and Harnish 1979). He argued
that an internalist framework is richer and more comprehensive than an exter-
nalist one. I had an opportunity to reply to Harnish in Essay 11, but in fact
  17

did so only indirectly, since I felt it a priority to explain why and how my
speech-act theoretical framework differs from the theories that accept the
Gricean reading of Austin offered by Strawson (1964).
It was in 2002 or shortly afterwards that I started realizing I should go back to
the philosophical inputs at the basis of my elaborations and analyses, especially
J. L. Austin’s philosophy of language. The role of keynote speaker at the 9th
International Pragmatics Conference (2005) gave me the opportunity to make a public
statement of what I thought to be the central contributions offered by How to Do Things
with Words (Austin 1975) to pragmatics and philosophy (Essay 10). In the following
years, I explored again and again what Austin said or implied about speech acts and
related topics, such as action, context, truth, meaning, or “propositions” (Essays 11,
13, 16; see also 2006a, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2014c, 2015). In 2006, I prepared the
project of a volume on Austin’s philosophy extending far beyond the theme of speech
acts, but the real work on the volume (now still in preparation) only began in 2017.
At any rate, in the two decades following 2000, I also kept on discussing and
updating my speech-act theoretical framework and my views on implicitness (Essays
11, 12, 14, 16, 17; see also 2007c, 2021a, 2021b) and using them in the analysis of
discourse (2003, 2006c, 2014a, 2017a; Sbisà and Vascotto 2007). I was also engaged
in a collaboration on the analysis of so-called “knowledge dissemination” through
the web and especially social media (Labinaz and Sbisà 2020, 2021a, 2021b): here,
too, what I write about assertion as a speech act from the theoretical point of view
(e.g., Essay 16) finds its counterpart in the analysis of naturally produced discourse.

4. Where All This Is Heading To

My overall project can be described as the construction of a non-metaphysical

theoretical framework for the study of speech as action. By “non-metaphysical”
I do not mean naturalistic (naturalism itself may be metaphysics in its own way).
I mean that my theoretical framework admits of the context-bound and intersub-
jectively based character of our use of language, tries to work on speech as action
from within these limits, and aims to provide tools for a better understanding of
what the texts we produce mean and do and why they mean and do just that.
I went some way in that direction: how far, it is up to the reader to say.² For
example, I realize that my treatment of classic issues such as the conventionality of
language and of illocution is far from exhaustive. At any rate, the development of
my views in the years through the essays republished in this collection and other
research work has led to some clarifications and refinements with respect to my
approach as introduced in Section 1. Concluding this introduction, I mention
briefly some areas to which these clarifications or refinements are relevant.

² Precious feedback to my work is provided by Caponetto and Labinaz eds. (forthcoming).

18 

(i) Speech-act theoretical terminology. In various essays republished here,

“speech act” is used as a synonym for “illocutionary act,” notwithstanding
my conviction that these expressions should be kept distinct. Each (total)
speech act (meaning by this what is done by a speaker who utters certain
words on a certain occasion, considered in its entirety) comprises an
illocutionary act, that is, can be described as an illocutionary act (in
consideration of its being designed for, or succeeding in, achieving a
certain illocutionary effect); rather obviously, however, it comprises also
a locutionary act, or else it would not be an act of speech. The fact that acts
of these two kinds at least (not to consider perlocutionary ones) regularly
co-exist does not justify using “speech act” to mean “illocutionary act” or
vice versa. Instead, that fact gives sense to the use of “in” made by Austin
when he calls the illocutionary act an act performed “in saying some-
thing”: it is not an act of speech, but an act that inhabits speech. Moreover,
“speech act” may have loose uses. For example, we may refer to an
utterance of a certain speaker on a certain occasion as their “speech
act,” even before examining whether it was really grammatical and mean-
ingful, or really felicitous and illocutionarily effective, or “seriously” issued
as opposed to being reframed as part of some “aetiolated” performance.
We may say that lying is a kind of speech act without implying that it is a
kind of illocutionary act, and call shaming a speech act, meaning by that a
kind of speech event in which the utterer is responsible for shaming effects
(to be further analyzed at the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocution-
ary levels). Writing on my views of speech acts anew, I would be more
rigorous in the use of those phrases. A second point of which I became
aware gradually is the misleading character of the expression “counts as”
when applied to utterances in the making of which the speaker performs
an illocutionary act. “Counts as” has a reductionist flavor, tracing a
“conventional” action back to a description of the allegedly basic action.
This implies that the conventional action does not amount to a real action
distinct from the basic one. Instead, in my view, both the locution and the
illocution are real actions: the speaker is legitimately held responsible for
both. So, recently I have given up the use of “counts as” in this context.
A third point is that Austin’s notion of “procedure” is rarely used in
speech act theory, but, when I realized it has a remarkable explanatory
potential, I introduced the term “procedure” into my lexicon (see Essays
14, 16, and 17). By “procedure” I mean a complex script, which may have
a higher or lower number of options at each step, such that whoever
executes its steps completely enough in appropriate circumstances should
be ceteris paribus recognized as performing the corresponding illocution-
ary act. The execution of a given procedure may follow its steps more or
less closely, and a performance may be hybrid or marginal with respect to
  19

the socially accepted repertoire of procedures. The advantages of introdu-

cing such a notion of procedure are that it is by far more flexible than the
received apparatus of felicity conditions, it may be appealed to not only
when illocutionary indicators give clear indication of the procedure
invoked but also in cases of vagueness, ambiguity, hybridity, marginality,
and interactional negotiation, and it may be used (as I claim in Essay 14)
to account for accommodation phenomena.
(ii) The securing of uptake. What the “securing of uptake” should consist in
and which is its function in the dynamics of illocution are still hot topics
in speech act theory. As to the former question, I think that it is primarily
the speaker who has to indicate what procedure they are invoking clearly
enough for the audience to recognize it. But for a speaker to invoke a
procedure may amount to behaving in the way envisaged by that proce-
dure: indeed, it is on the ground of the speaker’s verbal and non-verbal
behavior that the audience legitimately takes the speaker’s utterance as the
performance of a certain illocutionary act. Moreover, how the audience
understands a speech act is often not a matter of interpretation or explicit
assessment, but a matter of responding to the speech act in a way
appropriate to speech acts of a certain illocutionary force. When, espe-
cially in informal interaction, conversational contributions give merely
vague or ambiguous indications of their force and leave room for the
interlocutor to decide about how to proceed, uptake can be deemed to be
“secured” insofar as it actually occurs, that is, insofar as the interlocutor’s
response indicates that the speaker’s utterance was taken as having an
illocutionary effect reasonably compatible with the speaker’s behavior. As
to the latter question, I think that the audience’s uptake, explicit or tacit,
by default or on reasons, is part of that interpersonal agreement (explicit
or tacit, by default or negotiated) which makes utterances illocutionarily
effective. In the case of disagreement (recently discussed, e.g., by
McDonald 2020), I do not think there is one solution only. We should
take into consideration not merely the uptake made manifest by the
interlocutor’s response, but also the speaker’s reaction to that response,
by which they might (after all) show acceptance of the uptake obtained or
attempt to correct it by reformulating their speech act. Moreover, there
are many more possible shades and combinations of circumstances
which are worth examining. For example, there are situations in which
one of the participants (addressee, speaker, or observer) is granted greater
conversational power, so that their response determines what the speaker
did. There are situations, extended in time or suitably reframed, in which
participants who are observers or bystanders with respect to a certain
speech act may reject and correct the way in which its original audience
took it. At any rate, in no case would I locate the “securing of uptake”
20 

among the felicity conditions of an illocutionary act, since felicity condi-

tions, like procedures, are specific for each kind of illocutionary act, while
the securing of uptake is a general requirement and uptake itself is a phase
in illocutionary dynamics.
(iii) Varieties of implicitness. I still distinguish presupposition from implica-
ture by means of criteria inspired by the ways in which their contents are
made explicit and the functions they serve: in the explicitation of an
implicature, we infer a content that is not expressed on the text’s surface;
in the explicitation of a presupposition, we reformulate and foreground
content which is already present in the text in a linguistically back-
grounded form. Likewise, a content cannot be both explicitly affirmed
and made available by implicature, while content linguistically marked as
presupposed can conserve that status when explicitly formulated.
Presupposition (when not already shared) calls for accommodation,
may transmit new content as taken for granted or give taken-for-granted
status to old content, and fosters in-group participation. Implicature
makes its content available to the audience without the speaker being
explicitly committed to its truth, creates shades of meaning, and fosters
the co-responsibility of audience and speaker. However, I am no longer
willing to consider Gricean conventional implicatures as proper cases of
implicature (as I did in Essay 5): a more promising approach to them
would be (as I propose in 2021a, 183–4) to redefine them as preconditions
of speech acts with Expositive force (what Grice calls “non-central speech
acts”: Grice 1989, 121–2; see Austin 1975, 152, 161–3). In this case, the
field of implicitness would comprise, on the one hand, conversational
implicature (with its varieties ranging from generalized to context-specific
implicature and from implicature preserving the observance of the
maxims, to flouting implicature) and, on the other hand, presupposition,
which in turn should be divided at least into force-related presupposition,
appropriateness-related presupposition, and content that, while expressed
on the text’s surface, is syntactically marked as not-at-issue (2021a,
182–3). How to best organize the field of implicitness is, at any rate, not
only a matter of linguistic or logical theory but also a matter of refining
our awareness and mastery of explicitation practices.
(iv) My “externalism.” Harnish (2009) dubs my approach to speech acts
“externalist.” In fact, I maintain that, while it may be useful to consider
the speaker’s (expected) internal states when characterizing a kind of
illocutionary act, the attribution of an internal state to the speaker on a
particular occasion cannot determine what the speaker is doing, since it is
itself made on the basis of “external” facts such as what words the speaker
utters in what circumstances. While Harnish maintains that an internalist
framework is richer and more comprehensive than an externalist one,
  21

I think that focusing on internal states and processes might even hinder
the researcher from paying attention to intersubjective dynamics and its
potential for changing states of affairs in the world. In my approach to
speech as action, attributions of intentions to speakers are part of the
phenomena to be accounted for and cannot be invoked as grounds for
attributing locutionary and illocutionary agency or implicit meaning: in
order to use them in this way, we would need access to speakers’ inten-
tions regardless of what words they utter and how they behave. The first-
person perspective is no way-out, because there is no viable path from
subjectivity to intersubjectivity (as Avramides 2001 has argued). Instead,
both speech and action are located in the intersubjectively accessible
world, and in it, also acknowledgments of each other’s subjectivity
among human agents take place. Likewise, I do not resort to the partici-
pants’ actual beliefs to help determine what is implicit in a speech act
performed on a certain occasion, unless the participants make their
beliefs manifest in some relevant way. As regards implicitness, too, the
starting point must be what participants say and do in what circum-
stances. My approach thus strives to keep theory firmly rooted in the
intersubjective world.
(v) The underlying philosophy of action. My view of speech acts calls for
completion as to the notion of action to be used in it. Since the early
1980s, I have been aware that the conception of illocution and of its
relations with locution, perlocution, the (total) speech act, and aetiolation,
depends, in part at least, on how action is understood and defined. But,
after some explorations (1987a, 1989a) inspired on the one hand by
narrative semiotics and, on the other, by the philosophy of action of
G. H. von Wright, I did not tackle the task of specifying the conception
of action that matches my views on speech acts until recently, when I set
out to examine the connections between Austin’s outline of speech act
theory and his philosophy of action (Essay 10, 2013a, 2014c; see also in
preparation). Austin’s view of action, and mine too, are very far from the
standard view inspired by Davidson (1980), according to which action is
behavior appropriately caused by an intention (for criticism of this kind
of view, see Hornsby 2004, 2010). I associate action with (legitimate)
ascription of responsibility, rather than (actual) presence of intention.
I admit that action is connected to causation, but do not see the action as
something caused, whether by the agent or by any of their states or
attitudes, including intention. Whenever a state of affairs is identified as
caused or co-determined by the behavior of an agent, the agent is by
default ascribed the responsibility for bringing it about: so, causation is in
the picture simply because the action itself is the causing of its own
outcome. This view of action, whose details should be further developed
22 

and discussed, appears to be suitably coherent with my view of

speech acts, because they both focus on outcomes or effects as the grounds
for by-default ascriptions of responsibility (and therefore agency),
and moreover, leave room for adjustments, infelicities, or extenuation in
non-default conditions.
 1
On Illocutionary Types

1. Introduction

The aim of this paper is to propose a reconsideration of the old (and perhaps
old-fashioned) problem of the classification of illocutionary acts. This does not
mean that we are going to discover anything new about illocutionary acts. Rather,
we shall try to reformulate what we already know, according to different, and in
some respects more sophisticated criteria. Our inquiry shall attempt to avoid both
the traditional search for clear-cut theoretical classifications, and the recent
orientation toward an empirical attitude that refrains from all classification. The
main trouble with the former approach is its tendency toward fixism: the available
types of illocutionary acts seem to be established once and for all and can hardly
account for the theoretician’s own examples. The chief drawback of the latter
approach is that it risks a loss of relevance: when everything is empirical, and all
that is empirical is relevant, everything is relevant, and the researcher is left
without any criterion for selecting his/her object and categories. Nevertheless,
both rival approaches have their positive features, and it would certainly be worth
our while to try and salvage these. After all, the analysis of empirical data needs
theoretical distinctions and relevance criteria, if it is to give rise to interesting
hypotheses; and theoretical distinctions could themselves be formulated in a more
dynamic way, incorporating “cross-breeding” phenomena, shifts of relevance, in
short, all those non-standard cases that are so frequent in our everyday experience
and that cannot stop occurring in our analysis.
In order to proceed, however, we shall for a moment go back to the Austinian
notion of an illocutionary act. Since a direct reference to John L. Austin has
become rather unusual in speech act theory, I shall briefly indicate which aspects
of his thought I am using as to a source of methodological suggestions.

(i) In introducing his classes of illocutionary acts, Austin admits that his
“classification” includes marginal and peculiar cases as well as overlaps
between the classes. Furthermore, he dedicates most of his exposition to
the discussion of such overlaps. This suggests that his “classification”
should rather be considered as a descriptive mechanism which is not

Originally published in Journal of Pragmatics 8 (1), special issue on “Speech Acts after Speech Act
Theory,” ed. Paolo Leonardi and Marina Sbisà: 93–112. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1984.

Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics. Marina Sbisà, Oxford University Press. © Marina Sbisà 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844125.003.0002
24   

without a certain hybrid-generating potential. Our reformulation will

attempt to exploit such a feature, which could be of use in the task of
describing empirically produced illocutionary acts.
(ii) Austin shows a tendency toward foregrounding the effect of the act rather
than the means for performing it. In this perspective, an illocutionary act
should be defined not by the fact that certain means are used, but by the
fact that using such means amounts to invoking a socially acceptable way
of achieving a socially recognized kind of effect. We also shall foreground
effects. Moreover, we shall maintain that the Austinian notion of an act is
compatible with the notion, inspired by narrative semiotics, of an act as
the change from one state into another, the responsibility for which is
assigned to an agent (cf. Greimas and Courtés 1979, 5).¹
(iii) From the very beginning of his inquiry, Austin hints at the bilaterality of
performatives: without the interlocutor’s agreement, the relevant effect is
not realized (1975, 9, 22). Later on, he reframes such a bilaterality as the
fact that unless a certain effect is achieved (namely, the hearer’s uptake of
the meaning and of the force of the utterance), the illocutionary act will
not have been successfully performed (1975, 116–17). Since the hearer’s
uptake is in general manifested by his/her response or reaction, one might
even conclude that Austin’s theory does not allow definite illocutionary
forces to be assigned to isolated speech acts. Here, we shall take it for granted
that a speech act receives a definite illocutionary force, and brings about
a definite illocutionary effect, in conformity with the hearer’s uptake; more-
over, we shall admit of bilaterality not only in the performance of illocution-
ary acts but also in their effects, and suggest that sequential factors are
involved not merely in the interpretation of empirically produced speech
acts, but also in our reformulated definitions of the Austinian classes.

2. Austin’s Classification of Illocutionary Acts

As is well known, Austin’s classification of illocutionary acts includes: Verdictives,

that “consist in the delivering of a finding, official or unofficial, upon evidence
or reasons” (1975, 153); Exercitives, that are the exercising of powers, rights, or
influence in the giving of decisions or in the advocacy of decisions in favor of or
against a certain course of action (151, 155); Commissives, that commit the
speaker to a certain course of action (157); Behabitives, that include various
kinds of reactions to various kinds of actions and events (150); and Expositives,
that are acts used in the organization of discourse and of conversation (152, 161).

¹ I have discussed this notion in Sbisà 1983a and 1987a [referred to as “forthcoming” in the original
publication of this Essay].
    25

Though Austin does not make any explicit reference to criteria of classification,
we shall assume that his classes are not unmotivated. Our reconsideration will,
however, take into account only the four classes of Verdictives, Exercitives,
Commissives, and Behabitives, since the reasons for admitting of a class of
Expositives seem to be related to a different dimension of classification (Sbisà
1972; Searle 1979, 10).
The four Austinian classes with which we are concerned differ from each other
in some intuitive ways, among which the most apparent one is the different
hierarchical organization of their sets of felicity conditions. With regard to
Austin’s outline of felicity conditions (including a condition requiring, among
other things, the appropriateness of persons and circumstances, which seems to be
a counterpart of Searle’s preparatory conditions (1969); a sincerity condition; and
the requirement of the appropriateness of subsequent behavior, which we shall
call a consistency condition: Austin 1975, 14–15), it can be pointed out that
Exercitives are crucially related to the appropriateness of persons and circum-
stances, Behabitives to sincerity, and Commissives to consistency, while
Verdictives seem to be liable to all kinds of infelicity in equal measure (Sbisà
1972, 6–7). But the fact that one of these felicity conditions should prevail (or that
all of them should have the same importance), though it confirms our feeling that
Austin’s distinctions are not unmotivated, is not enough to define the four
illocutionary classes: it is too vague, it admits of degrees, and, finally, it does not
affect the roles of the felicity conditions in determining the successfulness and
appropriateness of the illocutionary act. For acts of all the four classes, it remains
true that the inappropriateness of persons and circumstances can make the act
void or voidable, while insincerity and inconsistency—whichever their degree of
importance—make it rather an abuse. Therefore, the prevailing importance of one
(or no) felicity condition(s) either is not relevant to our purposes or should be
traced back to some more central feature of the illocutionary act. Indeed, there
seems to be a correspondence between the prevailing importance of a felicity
condition and the kind of effect which is typical of each class of illocutionary acts:
for Behabitives, the importance of the sincerity condition is clearly related to the
fact that their effect is the manifestation of reactions which also involve attitudes,
feelings, and the like; for Commissives, the importance of the consistency condi-
tion lends itself as a basis for the undertaking of commitments; and in the cases of
Exercitives or of Verdictives, there is a correlation between the speaker’s power
(authority, influence . . . ) and the effect achieved by exercising it, respectively
between the general reliability of the speaker (his/her competence, sincerity, and
consistency) and the utterance’s claim to truth.² Thus, the intuitive consideration

² Of course, not all Verdictives are literally true or false. They do, however, put forward a claim to
some positive value such as fairness or correctness, belonging to a dimension of assessment that Austin
(1975, 140–5) considers as expressing an “assessment of the accomplished utterance” logically subsequent
to the assessment of the utterance itself as a felicitous one, and related with correspondence with facts.
26   

of the four Austinian classes matches the theoretical requirement that the
definition of illocutionary acts be given by reference to their effects; one could
be tempted to define the four classes by taking into account their most relevant
felicity condition, along with the typical effect of each act.
This is what we shall try to do in our next section, where, however, we shall no
longer talk of classes of illocutionary acts, but of illocutionary types, because we
want to make it clear that we are focusing on prototypical cases and do not
commit ourselves to such (impossible?) undertakings as finding a unique classi-
ficatory slot for every illocutionary force—let alone the illocutionary force of every
empirically produced utterance.³ For the moment, however, we shall comment on
some further difficulties which our project meets on its way.

2.1 How to Describe Illocutionary Effects

A first difficulty is that of isolating a genuinely illocutionary effect: something that

can be represented as an effect of the speech act (a change in the state of something
within the context of the interaction, occurring under the responsibility of the
speaker-agent), but which is not yet a perlocutionary effect. Searle’s own classifi-
cation of illocutionary acts, too, is affected by this difficulty: among his illocution-
ary points there is at least one, viz. that of Directives (attempting to get the hearer
to do something) which, if it describes an illocutionary effect at all, describes it in
perlocutionary terms, i.e., as a mere attempt to achieve a perlocutionary effect.
Besides, the illocutionary points of Assertives, viz. to commit the speaker to the
truth of the expressed proposition (1979, 12), and of Expressives, viz. to express
the psychological state specified in the sincerity condition (1979, 15), are not
effects in our sense, since they do not seem to be describable as changes of
something within the context of the interaction: rather, they have to do with
attitudes and standpoints of the speaker quite apart from the interactional rela-
tion, and with such philosophically puzzling matters as “truth” and “expression.”
Our way out of this difficulty will be to exploit an unusual sense of the old, and
often criticized label of “conventionality,” as attached by Austin to illocutionary acts,
by contrast to perlocutionary ones. Indeed, illocutionary effects are achieved on the
basis of an explicit or implicit agreement between the participants (think of the role
of the hearer’s uptake) and, at least in certain cases (such as the discovery of
infelicities of certain kinds), can be “undone” through further agreements. This
means that the changes that are brought about by the illocutionary act are not, or not
only, material, irreversible changes; they do not affect things or individuals, but
representations, in so far as these are agreed upon. We shall consider illocutionary

³ Hereby I also hope to escape those kinds of criticism of the classifications of illocutionary acts
which show them not to be “real” classifications (Ballmer 1979).
    27

effects as “conventional” in this sense and as affecting not merely the addressee
and/or the speaker, but the speaker–addressee relation or, more specifically, such
aspects of that relation as exist by virtue of an interactionally accepted definition.
Such changes in the speaker–addressee relation, or in its definition, are easily
represented by the assignment, subsequent to the speech act, of some modal or
propositional-attitude predicate such as “can,” “ought,” “know,” “believe,” “want”
to each participant.⁴ A first and provisional example is offered by the schematic
description of prototypical Exercitives outlined in Figure 1.
Our schematic descriptions of illocutionary types will employ a restricted
number of modal predicates. We shall not employ “want,” “believe,” or proposi-
tional attitude verbs in general, since the assignment of such predicates is related
to the expression of the corresponding attitudes by some individual, and the
attitudes themselves cannot be produced or cancelled, by mere agreement, in
the individual. We shall, however, employ “can” (in the deontic sense of “being
allowed” or “entitled,” “being in one’s right,” and the like) and “ought” (taken as
the equivalent of the German “sollen”). Deontic modalities seem to fit our case,
since their assignment relies on social understanding and acceptance, and it is
possible to cancel them. We shall also employ the epistemic modal predicate
“know,” which can be assigned and eliminated in a way parallel to that of deontic
modalities in so far as it involves the idea of being socially recognized as capable of
issuing reliable assertions on a certain matter.⁵

2.2 Who Is Affected by Illocutionary Effects?

A second difficulty arises with respect to the terms of the relation that we want to
describe. This difficulty becomes apparent, for example, if we try to extend the
scheme in Figure 1 to Commissives, as is done in Figure 1a.
In Figure 1a, the obligation, which is the most apparent illocutionary effect of
Commissives, is assigned by the speaker to him/herself while the addressee,

Exercitive illocutionary type:

Speaker Addressee
can ought
Figure 1

⁴ A somewhat analogous use of modal and propositional-attitude predicates is to be found in

Wunderlich’s interpretation of illocutionary types at the level of institutional pragmatics (1976,
89–99). Here, however, I rely mainly upon a semiotic notion of “modal competence,” that is, the set
of modal predicates belonging to a subject at a given stage of a narrative sequence (Greimas 1976,
Greimas and Courtés 1979, 53).
⁵ Such a notion of knowledge is inspired by some Wittgensteinian suggestions (see, e.g.,
Wittgenstein 1953, § 150), that I have discussed elsewhere (Sbisà 1980).
28   

Commissive illocutionary type:

Speaker Addressee
can ?
ought
Figure 1a

strangely enough, plays the role of an observer. However, it cannot be denied that
promises are always made to someone; if not to anybody else, at least to oneself:
someone must understand and accept the speaker’s commitment for it to be valid.
Thus, the addressee neither can be eliminated from our scheme nor is assigned a
precise role within it.
This difficulty (along with another, partly analogous one, singled out by Searle
with respect to the relation between Commissives and Directives in his classifica-
tion: 1979, 14–15) is linked to the fact that our schemes take into consideration the
speaker and the addressee qua actors of the linguistic exchange. As a way out,
I propose a shift to the more abstract level of the actants underlying the interac-
tional event, namely, the source of the illocutionary effect and the target affected by
it. The distinction between actants and actors, between the interactional functions
and the persons who perform them, is helpful here (as in various other cultural
contexts, more or less remote from speech act theory) for throwing some light on
the different behavior of notions such as that of individual or person, respectively
that of subject or “self,” and on the fact that the analysis of social interaction often
requires the self expressed by one social actor to be fragmented into a number of
different aspects, not only in marginal and deviant cases but in the very routine of
everyday life. In particular, the distinction between actors and actants proves useful
in all cases in which the same actantial function is performed by more than one
actor, or in which the same actor expresses more than one actant.⁶
The commissive illocutionary type seems to stage a situation of the latter kind:
Destinator and Destinee⁷ (source and target) of the illocutionary effect are in
general expressed by the same actor, namely, the speaker. If, however, a scheme
such as that in Figure 2 is, again, not sufficient for characterizing Commissives

⁶ For the semiotic definitions of “actant” and “actor,” see Greimas and Courtés (1979, 3–5, 7–8). It
should be pointed out that my use of these notions is only one of their possible applications. Moreover,
the use of “actor” to indicate the speaker is an oversimplification of the fact that a description of the
speaker as a person or individual would require, in comparison with the description of the underlying
actants, a great deal of thematic investments.
⁷ I use “Destinator–Destinee” for the French technical terms “destinateur–destinataire.” I have not
adopted the terms suggested by Greimas and Courtés (1979), viz. “addresser–addressee,” since these
also translate the French “énonciateur–énonciataire” and are perhaps more suited to this role than
“enunciator–enunciatee,” suggested by Greimas and Courtés (1979). I have not employed the terms
adopted by the English translation of Greimas and Courtés (1979), viz. “sender” and “receiver,” because
of their ambiguity between the material and the semiotic level (individuals as opposed to actants).
    29

Commissive illocutionary type:

Destinator Destinee
can ought
Figure 2

Commissive illocutionary type:

Destinator Destinee 1 Destinee 2
can can
ought
Figure 2a

(since it blurs the intuitive distinction between Exercitives and Commissives), we

can enrich it by redoubling the Destinee, as shown in Figure 2a.
Thus, we represent the illocutionary effect of Commissives as an effect on a
couple of Destinees, one of which⁸ is assigned a new obligation, while the other is
assigned the right to expect the fulfillment of such an obligation. The part of
Destinee, here indicated as Destinee 2, is most often performed by the same actor
who expresses the Destinator, or by an actor who is more or less directly related to
him/her; however, the actant–actor distinction allows also for non-standard cases.
We shall extend the structure displayed in Figure 2a (one Destinator, a couple
of Destinees) to the other illocutionary types, since the reduplication of the
Destinee seems apt to account for the fact that the illocutionary effect is an effect
on a relation.

2.3 Illocutionary Effects and Felicity Conditions

A parallel difficulty arises from some aspects of the relationship between felicity
conditions and illocutionary effects. Felicity conditions, in an Austinian frame-
work, are intersubjective requirements on which hearers rely in their understand-
ing of illocutionary acts: in particular, preparatory conditions require that persons
and circumstances be appropriate, i.e., accepted as appropriate by the participants
as opposed to merely intended as appropriate by the speaker. Therefore, such
conditions should be taken to refer to the state of the context previous to the
occurrence of the illocutionary act. Accordingly, in all our schemes from Figure 1
to Figure 2a, the modal predicate assigned to the speaker (or to the Destinator of
the illocutionary act) has been represented as the point of departure of an arrow

⁸ Since gender roles are thematic roles, the actant is not yet concerned with them. Therefore, it does
not make sense to refer to the actant as to he/she: I take it to be neuter (and shall write “It,” “Its” with a
capital I in order to facilitate anaphora).
30   

directed toward the illocutionary effect. Yet, speakers can give their hearers new
information by way of implicitly communicating the preparatory conditions of
their illocutionary act, so that, in many cases, the hearers do not seem to be aware
of the contextual features required by the preparatory conditions until they
understand the speaker’s illocutionary act and accept it as a felicitous one.
Therefore, the representation of preparatory conditions is in some respect subse-
quent to the illocutionary act; and doubts may arise as to whether or not we should
represent the assignment of the modal predicate specified by the preparatory
condition as a backward effect of the act on the speaker, as shown in Figure 3.
The scheme in Figure 3 describes those cases in which the speaker’s power or
authority is increased, or even established by the accepted successfulness of the
illocutionary act (think of the first Exercitives issued by a rebel leader) and can
perhaps be extended to all Exercitives. But it effaces the distinction between what
is held to have been the case before the illocutionary act, and what is held to be the
case “now” (from the illocutionary act on). This becomes apparent in the tentative
extension of that scheme to Commissives, which is represented in Figure 3a.
The scheme in Figure 3a may appear simpler than that in Figure 2a and
therefore preferable; however, there is little doubt that the predicate “ought,”
which it assigns to the speaker, takes effect from the illocutionary act on, whereas
the predicate “can,” that the scheme in Figure 3 assigns to the speaker, represents
the modal state of the speaker not only as it is after the act but also as it must have
been beforehand. The distinction between actors and actants again offers a way
out. The notion of a Destinator involves the idea of some priority with respect to
the effect on the Destinee(s), so that the arrow from the modal predicate assigned
to the Destinator to that assigned to the Destinee(s) is no longer necessary. At the
same time, an actant Destinator cannot exist apart from Its act, nor apart from
the latter’s Destinee(s), so that the modal predicate that fits Its description cannot
be selected until Its act has achieved its effects. This feature can account for the

Exercitive illocutionary type:

Speaker Addressee
ought
can
Figure 3

Commissive illocutionary type:

Speaker Addressee
can
ought
Figure 3a
    31

backward effects of the illocutionary act without any need to represent these by
means of a backward oriented arrow. Therefore, our arrows can simply be
dispensed with. Moreover, the doubling of the Destinee establishes a firm
distinction between the actantial description of the state of the speaker–addressee
relation subsequent to the speech act, and the description of the speaker qua
Destinator.
Concluding then, our schematic descriptions will express:

(i) the way in which the previous modal state of the actor, who performs
the Destinator of the illocutionary act, is to be described qua the
Destinator’s state, if the illocutionary act is considered as successfully
performed;
(ii) the modal states, subsequent to the illocutionary act and correlated to each
other, of the actors who express Destinee 1 and Destinee 2, qua Destinees.
This will be done by means of the modal predicates “can,” “ought,” and
“know.” The positive assignment of one of these predicates will be indi-
cated by the symbol “+,” its elimination by the symbol “ ”.

3. Four Illocutionary Types

As a partial reformulation of the Austinian classes of illocutionary acts, I propose

the four schematic descriptions of illocutionary types, which are collected in Table 1.
These schematic descriptions do not claim to be full descriptions of empirically
produced tokens of illocutionary acts; their aim is to offer a model for such
descriptions, which in fact should be richer and more complicated. Our schematic
descriptions, however, are oversimplified even as models and could be expanded
in several ways:

(i) by admitting of more than one modal predicate for each slot;
(ii) by using more specific labels instead of, or together with, the highly
general labels “can,” “ought,” “know”;
(iii) by indicating which kind of propositional content is to be embedded by
each occurrence of each modal predicate;

Table 1

Illocutionary type Destinator Destinee 1 Destinee 2

Exercitives + can ± ought ± ought

Commissives + can + can + ought
Verdictives + can + knows + ought
Behabitives + ought + knows ought
32   

(iv) by including those modal predicates (such as “want” and “believe”) that
are assigned to the Destinator by the sincerity condition of the act;
(v) by including the modal predicates of the sincerity condition kind,⁹ in
order to represent the possible alignment of the Destinee(s) with the
perlocutionary object of the act.

In this paper, we shall not have space for these further problems, which anyway
are not essential to our aim of preparing a first, workable guide to the effect-
centered description of illocutionary acts.

3.1 Exercitives

According to Searle (1979, 10), the notion of an Exercitive relies on features such
as status, or relationship to institutions, which are not relevant to the dimensions
of classification upon which Searle focuses his attention. Therefore, he does not
admit of an exercitive illocutionary point, and splits up the Austinian Exercitives
into two groups, the one included among Directives, the other among
Declarations. Exercitives are split up in a parallel way also by Vendler (1972,
6–26), who distinguishes between Exercitives proper and a class of Operatives.
The distinction that is singled out by both authors has its own point and can be
accepted by us, provided it is not a distinction between kinds of illocutionary
effects. For us, all Exercitives can be said to presuppose a power (their Destinator
is assigned “+can”) and to bring about a creation or elimination of obligations.
But the linguistic performance of, as well as the report on Exercitives assigning
obligations relative to extralinguistic institutions does not need to specify the
contents of such obligations (these have been established, or are even listed,
elsewhere), whereas Exercitives that operate with reference to particular, concrete
occasions of interaction, without any interference with the possible institutional
features of their context, must specify the particular contents of at least one of the
assigned, or eliminated, obligations. This determines the syntactic differences
pointed out by both Vendler (1972, 20–3) and Searle (1979, 22, 26–7).
Four further problems that are worth mentioning are:

(i) Destinee 2 does not seem to play an essential role in the description of
Exercitives. However, it should be stressed that the assignment or elimi-
nation of a predicate of the “ought” kind is often, or even in general,
accompanied by the assignment or elimination of a complementary
obligation to, or from, a partner of the addressee (who could also be a

⁹ [What I had in mind were predicates attributing attitudes as opposed to deontic modalities.]
    33

collective actor). An order establishes for Destinee 2 (usually performed

by the speaker) that he/she ought not to carry out the action him/herself,
and, moreover, that he/she ought to evaluate the subsequent perfor-
mances of the actor expressing Destinee 1 by reference to the obligation
assigned to him/her by the order itself. Christian baptism assigns to
Destinee 1 the obligations shared by all members of Christianity and to
Destinee 2 (Christianity, not the baptizer: the latter, in particular cases,
might not him/herself be a Christian) the obligation to accept Destinee 1
as one of its members.¹⁰
(ii) There are Exercitives which could be described as assigning to Destinee 1
a modal predicate “± can” (for example, permission, prohibition, and
certain kinds of appointments). Such acts can be related to our exercitive
illocutionary type insofar as the assignment or elimination of the predi-
cate “can” can also be formulated as the elimination or the assignment of a
predicate of the “ought” kind, embedding a negative proposition; or else,
insofar as they can be described as belonging to a sub-type which joins to
the assignment of “±ought” the assignment of “±can.” However, it should
be pointed out that nominations and appointments are to be considered
as Exercitives (as opposed to Commissives) as far as the charge or title
they assign is considered primarily as a task and, therefore, as a set of
obligations.
(iii) A speaker may issue commands on the basis not of a recognized authority,
but of the brute fact that he/she possesses a gun (Searle 1979, 7). Such a
fact is, of course, not an institutional fact, nor even a “conventional” fact
in our sense. Thus, it seems that, at least for some Exercitives, one of the
assigned modal predicates does not need to be “conventional.” But a
second look at this example will easily show how we should deal with it.
The utterance of an imperative sentence by a speaker possessing a gun
produces the effect represented as “+ought,” namely a deontic obligation,
only if the speaker is recognized by the addressee as entitled to produce
such an effect (or if his/her power is recognized as a power to engender
deontic obligation). Such brute facts as the possession of a gun (perhaps,
together with further assumptions about the legitimacy of the possession)
may count as grounds for this recognition. But if the recognition does not
occur, the possession of a gun can merely create a state of necessity (as
opposed to one of deontic obligation), and the speaker’s utterance does

¹⁰ [In this example, I was considering baptism qua illocutionary act, not qua sacrament. When
assimilating the ritual formulas of sacraments to performative utterances, and therefore sacraments to
illocutions, it should be considered that what is believed to bring about their specifically sacramental
effects is not the minister’s words, but God’s grace.]
34   

not count as an Exercitive in our sense, in spite of its apparent, or even

successful, directive goal.
(iv) Directivity is obviously connected with the use of the imperative mood;
the latter is also one of the most widespread devices for performing certain
varieties of exercitive illocutionary acts. Moreover, the most obvious
means of getting the addressee to do something is to achieve agreement
about a definition of the interactional relation, such that the addressee is
assigned the obligation to do something. This can explain why so many
Directives are Exercitives as well, but does not yet clarify the connection
between exercitivity and directivity. Here, we cannot enter into a detailed
discussion of this problem, which would also give rise to a wider debate on
the relationship between illocutionary forces and perlocutionary objects.
We can merely point out that, in our framework, the directive, perlocu-
tionary object of getting someone to do something can be pursued not
only by exercitive illocutionary acts but also by Verdictives (such as
evaluations), Behabitives (such as challenges), and Commissives (such
as threats).

3.2 Commissives

Our schematic description for the commissive illocutionary type does not apply
only to prototypical promises. It can account for the cases in which Destinator and
Destinee 2 are expressed by distinct actors, as in many cases of guaranteeing, or in
those promises which involve the future action of a subordinate. It can also be
used in describing “espousals” (consenting, siding with, favoring, and the like: cf.
Austin 1975, 152, 158). In acts of espousal, the proposition embedded by the
predicate assigned to Destinee 2 (“+ought”) does not specify a particular action
but a more general orientation of conduct, or some constraints on it, which,
however, correspond to the expectations that the addressee (who expresses
Destinee 1) is thereby entitled to have.
Some problems are raised by the two different occurrences of one and the same
predicate “+can.” If assigned to Destinee 1, “+can” is to be understood as repre-
senting the right to expect or even exact the fulfillment of the obligation which is
assigned to Destinee 2. If assigned to the Destinator, “+can” is more puzzling. It
should not be understood as representing the Destinator’s capacity to do some-
thing (i.e., to fulfill the obligation assigned to Destinee 2), since this would conflate
Destinator and Destinee 2. Nor is it enough to say that such a “+can” represents a
capacity to cause something to be done by Destinee 2, since this is not necessarily a
“conventional” feature and, moreover, would link Commissives to one among
their possible perlocutionary goals. I would rather say that “+can” represents here
the acknowledgment that the Destinator has a right to authorize Destinee 1 to
    35

hold certain expectations with respect to Destinee 2. The recognition of a capacity

is, however, to be regarded as a ground for assigning such a right to the Destinator.

3.3 Verdictives

In our schematic description of the verdictive illocutionary type, Verdictives

appear essentially as formulations of knowledge which rely on the Destinator’s
modal predicate “+can.” Such a predicate expresses, in this case, the competence
of the Destinator with regard to the subject matter of the Verdictive. Such a
competence could also be represented by a predicate “+know,” since competence
is often identifiable with the knowledge of the criteria according to which the
Destinator formulates the relevant kind of knowledge, or (when these criteria are
held to be commonly shared, as in the case of everyday empirical statements) with
the Destinator’s acquaintance with the relevant “facts.” However, the choice of the
predicate “+can” stresses that the Destinator is competent in so far as It is
recognized as competent and, therefore, entitled to formulate a certain piece of
knowledge. Moreover, “+can” could be extended to include social and cultural
constraints on the performance of Verdictives (not everybody is equally likely to
be authorized to formulate knowledge about everything: think of such social
actors as children or women as opposed to male adults, or lay people as opposed
to priests, and reporters as opposed to juries). As to the Destinees, it could be
observed that many Verdictives do not encode the reference to an addressee. But
for us this cannot mean that they have no Destinee: Verdictives take effect on the
interactional relation as much as all other illocutionary acts; furthermore, we are
considering them just insofar as they have such effects (by the same token, we shall
leave aside the question as to whether merely mental formulations of knowledge
should be represented as involving one or more actants). In the case of many
Verdictives, Destinee 1 (which, after the speech act, can be said to possess the
piece of knowledge formulated in the speech act) is performed by any hearer, and
even by hearers to whom the act is apparently not addressed (think of spies). As to
Destinee 2, Its presence in the schematic description stresses that the formulation
of knowledge is to be guaranteed by someone, who is thereby assigned a predicate
of the “+ought” kind. Such a Destinee 2 is usually performed by the actor who also
expresses the Destinator (as in Commissives), but there are cases in which the two
are performed by distinct actors, for example those Verdictives in which the
speaker does not commit him/herself to give evidence, but sends Destinee 1
back to some external “authority” (ranging all the way from Aristotle to the
computer), that is held to possess the relevant evidence.
It should be pointed out that our Verdictives do not correspond to Searle’s
Assertives. The latter include only those speech acts that can be said to be true or
false, while our Verdictives, like Austin’s, include also acts which should rather be
36   

evaluated as fair/unfair, sound/unsound, correct/incorrect, and even good/bad.

A further problem lies in the relationship of Assertives, respectively Verdictives, to
a possible dimension of speech act classification that considers the linguistic or
extralinguistic character of illocutionary effects. All Assertives seem to belong to
Expositives as well: the cases in which their effects involve matters external
to discourse or conversation are classed by Searle separately as “Assertive
Declarations” (1979, 19–20). However, here we shall not attempt to draw such a
distinction, which is a difficult one in its own right, to be discussed with reference
to all of our four illocutionary types.

3.4 Behabitives

The idea underlying our schematic description of the behabitive illocutionary type
is that of a reaction of the Destinator, offered by It to Destinee 1 as an object of
knowledge. This enables us to represent the Behabitives as operating on, and
within, an interactional relation. It is mainly in this respect that our Behabitives
differ from Searle’s Expressives. However, Searle’s definition of Expressives
accounts for what we have called the prevailing importance of the sincerity
condition by linking the illocutionary point to such a condition. In order to
account for this feature of Behabitives, we shall have to specify that what
Destinee 1 comes to be acquainted with includes the state which is assigned to
the Destinator by the sincerity condition of the act. It should be pointed out that
this does not commit us to take into consideration the actual occurrence of a
certain psychological state in the speaker’s mind. Behabitives, like other illocu-
tionary acts, can be valid, though insincere; insincerity makes them abuses, not
misfires (cf. Austin 1975, 40). Moreover, our use of the predicate “+know” is
relative to the interactional situation in which its assignment occurs, and does not
commit us to accept the embedded proposition as a true one. Our notion of
knowledge, here as well as in the case of Verdictives, is a notion of what counts, or
is recognized, as knowledge in a certain situation, but could still turn out to be
false or cease to be recognized as genuine knowledge, as opposed to a notion of
“absolute” knowledge which is supposed to have found “the facts” once and for all.
Offering one’s own act as an object of knowledge to someone else does not state
any requirement of competence, rights, or authority on the part of the Destinator.
Rather, it seems appropriate to say that a Behabitive is successfully performed
insofar as it is, in some sense, a due reaction: Behabitives involve the manifestation
of a “self,” which is represented as being called upon. Thus, if the Destinator of a
Behabitive is to be assigned any of our modal predicates, the most obvious
candidate is “+ought.” The deontic character of such a predicate is apparent in
many cases (apologies, thanks, wishes, challenges); however, also for those cases in
which the Behabitive seems to react to “brute” facts (e.g., needs or wishes, as
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Saksalaisten
sotavankina
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Saksalaisten sotavankina

Muistelmia ja kuvia

Author: Kaarlo Takalampi

Release date: November 13, 2023 [eBook #72116]

Language: Finnish

Original publication: Hämeenlinna: Arvi A. Karisto Oy, 1914

Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

SAKSALAISTEN SOTAVANKINA ***
SAKSALAISTEN SOTAVANKINA

Muistelmia ja kuvia

Kirj.

KAARLO TAKALAMPI

Kariston 50 p:n kirjoja N:O 45.

Hämeenlinnassa, Arvi A. Karisto, Hämeenlinna 1914.

Sotasensuurin hyväksymä 13.-21.XI 1914.

Höyrylaiva "Uleåborgin" lähtiessä Raumalta syysk. 7 p:nä illalla klo

5 tienoissa, ei kellään ollut aavistusta kaikesta siitä, mitä lähinnä
seuraavat tunnit tuovat mukanaan.

Yhtä tyynesti kuin tavallisesti, ryhdytään matkavalmistuksiin.

 Keulassa sidotaan ankkurit ja muut irrallaan olevat tavarat.
Keulaluukku peitetään tralleilla ja purjekangas kiilataan niitten päälle.

Ensimäinen ruotelivahti lähtee täyttämään velvollisuuttaan

komentosillalle, jossa jo ennestään luotsin ohella on kapteeni ja
toinen perämiehistä.

Muut vahdissa olevat matruusit pingottavat tuulensuojapurretta

ylähangan puolelle, jota toimenpidettä perällä, jäissä kylmenevän
punssin ääressä istuvat matkustajat pahoittelevat, sillä se estää
heidän näkemästä kaunista auringonlaskua, joka leikkii hiljalleen
aaltoilevilla laineilla.

Tuulensuojassa alihangan alla on matkustajista suurin osa. Toisiin

on meri jo tehnyt vaikutuksensa ja pahoinvoinnin merkkejä saa
nähdä siellä, täällä. Toiset taas ovat kyyristyneet
matkapäällystakkeihinsa ja huopapeitteisiin, istuen yksin jossakin
nurkassa ja taistellen meritautia vastaan tai lukien. Jotkut kävelivät
edestakaisin perä- ja keskikannella ja muuan tuijottaa reilinkiin
nojaten hämärtyvälle merelle, joka lupaa pysyä tänä yönä
kohtuullisen sävyisenä.

Kannella ovat sähkövalot jo sytytetyt. Salonkien suurista

akkunoista tulvii lukemattomien lamppujen häikäisevä valo.
Ruokasalongissa istuu muuan ijäkkäämpi herrasmies, wiskygroggia
nauttien ja pakisten tarjoilijattarien kanssa. Peräsalongin pehmeillä
sohvilla lepäilee kokonainen seura ja vilkas puhelu, jota hilpeä nauru
silloin tällöin katkasee, todistaa ilon olevan ylimmillään.

Väliin näkee tarjoilijattarien tai siivoojattarien, valkeine

esiliinoineen kiirehtivän poikki kannen ja katoavan salonkeihin.
 Keittiön ilmanvaihtotorvista lemuaa voimakkaana valmistuvan
ruuan haju, kertoen illallisajan olevan lähellä. Ja siihen viittaa myös
harjaajapojan ruokaa täynnä olevat höyryävät, suuret valkeat astiat,
joine hän katoaa keulassa sijaitsevaan "skanssiin."

Ja tämän tunnelman voimakaistuttaa ja tekee kiinteäksi koneitten

tahdikas jyske.

*****

Majakkalaivaa lähestyessä havaitaan "Relandersgrund"

kadonneeksi. Sen sijalla on toinen, jonka savutorvi ja muukin
ulkonainen varustelu osoittavat sen höyrykoneilla käyväksi. Se on
kauttaaltaan punainen.

Luotsilippu nostetaan keulamastoon.

Majakkalaivasta lähtee soutovene ulos merelle. Se suuntaa

kulkunsa suoraan "Uleåborgin" reitille.

Komentosillalta soivat merkinantokellot konehuoneeseen.

"Uleåborg" hiljentää vauhtiaan.

Nuoratikkaat lasketaan välikannen keulaportista. Luotsi saapuu

sinne.

Luotsivene on jo kohdalla. Laivan koneet seisovat. Köysi viskataan

veneeseen. Vene tempautuu mukaan. Luotsi hyppää siihen tikkaista.
Köysi heitetään irti. Voimakkaat kädet tarttuvat airoihin. Vene etenee
majakkalaivaa kohti.

Merkinantolaitteet soivat konehuoneessa. Koneet alkavat taas

jyskiä.
Potkuri pieksee vettä vimmatusti. Keulassa kohisevat korkeat
kuohut.

Majakkalaiva jää jälkeemme. Se pienenee.

Edessä ja takana aaltoilee silmänkantamiin aava meri, jonka

länsipuoliskolla leikittelee yhä voimistuva iltarusko.
II

Kello on kahdeksan.

Vahti lyö laivan keulakellolla kahdeksan lyöntiä.

Merivahti vaihtuu.

Pimeys levittäytynyt meren yli. Taivaanrannalla on iltaruskosta

jälellä vain loistava purppuran punainen viiva. Taivas on vetäytynyt
pilveen.

Merkkivalot laivan mastoissa ja molemmilla sivuilla ovat sytytetyt.

Tähystäjä asettuu paikalleen kokkaan. Uusi ruotelivahti lähtee

komentosillalle ja saatuaan kurssin, vapauttaa edeltäjänsä.

Edellinen vahtijoukkue menee "skanssiin" ja ryhtyy aterialle.

Vähän ajan kuluttua astuvat nokiset lämmittäjät poikki keulakannen
ja katoavat omaan skanssiosaansa.

Matkustajat viipyvät vielä kannella. Melkein kaikki ovat ulkona.

Äkkiä katkasee hiljaisuuden tähystäjän karkea ääni keulassa:

 — Epämääräistä valontuiketta suoraan edessä.

Ääni kuolee pois. Kaikki on taas hiljaista.

Kukaan ei tähän huutoon erikoista huomiota kiinnitä. Tällaisia

valoja näkyy merimatkoilla useimmiten lukemattomia. Ainoastaan
komentosillalla koetetaan etsiä esinettä, josta se lähti.

Mitään epäilyttävää ei näy. Valo on kadonnut kokonaan.

Kuletaan edelleen täyttä vauhtia Gefleä kohden. Nopeus yksitoista

solmunväliä. Laiva keikkuu hiljalleen. Ollaan noin kaksikymmentä
meripeninkulmaa. Raumalta. Kello on yhdeksän.

Äkkiä sukeltaa pimeydestä esiin tumma laiva, ilman merkkivaloja.

Se kulkee pysähtymättä nopeasti sivutsemme ja katoaa jäljettömiin.

Se oli sotalaiva. Torpeedovene. Sen voi nähdä.

Tämä äkkinäinen salaperäisen laivan näky herättää hämmästystä.

Mitä lajia laivaa se oli? Venäläinenkö vai vihollislaiva?

Mutta kun se noin yhtäkkiä katosi, edes seisauttamatta

laivaamme, rauhoitutaan.

Ehkä se oli venäläinen, joka kävi ottamassa selvää laivastamme ja

nähtyään, että se oli suomalainen, poistui.

Mutta se on erehdys. Kotvasen kuluttua se ilmestyy uudelleen

pimeästä ja tuikaten sähkövalolaitteella antaa merkkejä jonnekin.

Se pysähtyy laivamme alihangan puolelle, aivan viereen.

 Se on saksalainen!

Saksalaiset komentosanat huudetaan suhahtavalla räiskinällä.

"Uleåborgille" annetaan määräyksiä.

— Koneet seisomaan!

Käskyä totellaan.

— Kaikki kannelle.

Salaman nopeudella kiidätetään sana kaikkialle.

— Saksalainen torpeedovene on täällä!

Kaikki kannelle!

Syntyy hämminki. Juostaan, huudetaan. Toiset ryntäävät

hytteihinsä ja tempaavat mukaansa minkä ensin käteensä saavat.
Vuoteille ehtineet hyppäävät ylös. Pukeutuvat kiireesti. Kuuluu
naisten itkua ja valitusta.

— Kannelle, kannelle! kuuluu huutoja.

Ja kaikki ryntäävät kannelle.

Saksalaisten komennussanat räiskivät edelleen. — Joku

upseereista torpeedolaivalla puhuu ruotsia. — Jokaista määräystä
on täsmälleen toteltava. Kaikki käy kuin lentäen.

Tyynenä ja rauhallisena toistaa laivamme kapteeni määräykset.

Hän koettaa rauhoittaa väkeään ja matkustajia.
 — Mitään vaaraa ei ole. Malttia vain!

Torpeedovene kiinnitetään "Uleåborgin" sivulle. Portit avataan.

Silta asetetaan torpeedoveneestä laivallemme.

— Kaikkien on tultava torpeedoveneeseen, kuuluu määräys.

Riennetään hakemaan matkahuopia. Joku matkustajista yrittää

laahata muassaan suuria matkakorejakin.

Torpeedoveneelle siirto alkaa.

— Naiset ensiksi! huudetaan

Torpeedoveneellä otetaan vastaan. Toinen toisensa perästä

siirrytään keinuvaa siltaa myöten "Uleåborgista". Ensin matkustajat,
sitten naiset, miehistö ja kapteeni viimeisenä.

Juoksujalassa tarkastavat saksalaiset upseerit laivan.

— Onko ketään?

— Ei ole!

Hekin poistuvat. Silta otetaan pois. Köydet irrotetaan.

"Uleåborg" seisoo paikallaan. Koneitten jyske on tauonnut. Sen

aivot eivät enää ajattele, sen sydän ei tyki. Yksin, hyljättynä seisoo
se tuossa sivullamme ja laineet leikkivät sen valkoista kylkeä
vastaan. Se on täydessä valaistuksessaan. Salongeista, venttiileistä
ja kannelta loistaa keltainen valo. On kuin sen tyhjissä suojissa
juhlisivat näkymättömät olennot.
 Torpeedoveneen konehuoneeseen annetaan merkki. Kellot soivat.
Koneet alkavat surista. Ensin hiljaa, sitten voimakkaammin.

Torpeedovene jättää "Uleåborgin". Se jää paikalleen.

Mikä on oleva sen kohtalo? Tuonneko se jätetään noin

ajelehtimaan?
Lukemattomia kysymyksiä satelee.

Naiset ovat kuletetut peräsalonkiin. Heille tarjoillaan hedelmiä,

makeisia. Heille lausutaan kohteliaisuuksia ja pyydetään pysymään
rauhallisina.

Mutta äkkiä kuulevat he koneitten surinan taukoavan, potkurien

seisahtuvan?

Miksi?

He kuulevat miten ylhäältä kannelta kuuluu komentosanoja ja

sitten perällepäin suuntautuvia askeleita. Lukemattomia askeleita
jalkojen töminää.

Mitä se merkitsee?

Tuodaanko koko väki tänne?

Ei, ovi ei avaudu. Ketään ei näy..

Heidän jännityksensä kasvaa.

Samassa pamahtaa kanuuna. Pamahtaa toinen, kolmas…

Herra jumala! Ovatko venäläiset laivat täällä? Me olemme

hukassa. Pohjaan ne meidät ampuvat. Armotta. Ei tällainen pieni
torpeedovene jaksa puoliaan pitää.

Naiset ovat epätoivoissaan. Toiset jo itkevät. Mutta heitä tullaan

lohduttamaan.

Heillä ei ole mitään vaaraa. Se on "Uleåborgia" kun vaan

viimeistellään…

Niin, höyryl. "Uleåborgia" viimeistellään.

Se seisoo noin sadanmetrin päässä torpeedoveneestä.

Valonheittäjä on suunnattu siihen. Sen valkoinen runko ihan hohtaa
kirkkaassa valaistuksessa.

Torpeedolaivan keulakanuuna on suunnattu siihen. Kuuluu

paukaus. Tykki sylkee tulta. Kuula iskee "Uleåborgin" keskiosan
vesirajaan. Vesipatsas nousee ilmaan.

Taas paukahtaa tykki. Taas sylkee se tulta. Taas nousee

vesipatsas vedestä.

Tuntuu kuin vanha "Uleåborg" vavahtaisi. Mutta yhä se seisoo

paikallaan, yhä loistavat valot kannelta, salongeista, venttiileistä. On
kuin se uhmaisi näitä uuden ajan murhaavia ampuma-aseita.

Tykit paukkuvat. Kuulat iskevät kivakasti valkoiseen runkoon.

Ne ovat kai särkeneet jonkun putken. Höyryä tulvii sankkoina

pilvinä.
Räjähtääkö pannu?

Kaikkien silmät ovat nauliutuneet "Uleåborgiin". Odotetaan

jännityksellä.
 Mitään räjähdystä ei kuulu, ei näy.

Seuraavat laukaukset suunnataan perään. Tuli leimahtaa

valloilleen. Paksuja savupilviä alkaa vyöryä esiin. Tuli leviää
keskikautta kohti. Se nousee korkealle, leimahtelee. Nuoleskelee
mastoja ja pelastusveneitä aurinkokannella.

Yhtäkkiä vaikenevat kanuunat. Kaikki on hetkisen ääneti.

Tunnelma on melkein juhlallinen.

Yhä korkeammalle kohoavat liekit palavalla laivalla. Ne

tunkeutuvat yhä keulemmas. Sytyttävät ruokasalin. Hurjalla riemulla
hypähtävät ne korkealle ja heittävät heijastettaan öiselle taivaalle ja
synkkään mereen.

Kaikkeen tähän on kulunut noin puolisen tuntia: kaappaukseen

kaksikymmentä minuuttia, laivan tuhoamiseen loput.

Taas alkavat torpeedoveneen koneet surista. Niiden surina yltyy.

Kokka viiltää vettä suurin lainein. Nopeus on huimaava. Jotkut
arvelevat tehtävän ainakin kolmekymmentä solmunväliä. Etelään on
kiire.

Yö kirkastuu. Pilvet hajaantuvat. Tähdet alkavat tuikkia kirkkaina.

Kuun silta läikkyy hopeaisissa laineissa. Ennen aamua on oltava
Itämerellä.

Mutta palavasta "Uleåborgista" eivät silmät erkane. Kaikkien

katseet seuraavat sitä. Laiva pienenee pienenemistään. Näky on
juhlallinen ja valtava, mieleenpainuva.

Muitten kanssa seuraa katseillaan palavaa laivaa vanha

koneenkäyttäjä. Hän on palvellut sitä kuusitoista vuotta. Kokenut sen
kanssa myrskyt ja tyvenet. Se on tullut hänelle rakkaaksi ja
läheiseksi. Se on tullut hänelle osaksi elämäänsä. Kuutenatoista
pitkänä vuotena ehtii jo kiintyä johonkin.

Näky koskee häneen syvästi. Tuskan tunne syöksyy hänen

ylitsensä kuin hyökyaalto.

Ja tuo vanha, suuri ja lihava mies, jonka tunteet luulisi

pitkäaikaisen merielämän, mukavuuden ja monivaiheisten
kokemusten paaduttaneen, itkee.
III

Kaikki se mikä tähän asti on tapahtunut on pitänyt meitä ankarassa

jännityksessä. Ja vaikka nyt tuleekin pieni väliaika, jolloin
uskallamme kotvasen hengittää, väijyvät meitä kuitenkin alituisesti
tulevaa kohtaloamme kysyvät ajatukset. Ei tietysti kaikkia. Useat
ottavat asian sangen huolettomasti ja nauravat…

Istumme vähäisillä matkatavaroillamme komentosillan takana

olevan suuren savutorven suojassa ja kuuntelemme koneitten
surinaa suurista ilmanvaihtotorvista.

Siinä on kirjavaa joukkoa. Vanhoja ja nuoria. Itävaltalaisia,

saksalaisia, ruotsalaisia, mutta eniten suomalaisia.

Uteliaina tarkastelevat meitä torpeedoveneen matruusit.

Ensi hämmästyksestä toivuttua, aletaan pakista.

Tupakka muistui mieleemme ensi hätään.

— Uskaltaakohan täällä polttaa? kysyy hintelä ja luiseva timperi

parastelaisruotsillaan. Hän on ankara tupakkamies.

— Tottakai, koska matruusitkin polttavat.

 — Niin, ja olemmehan mekin matruuseja, pilailee ensi matkaa
muassa oleva jungmanni,.

Timperi kaivaa "Työmies"-savukkeen taskustaan ja tunkee sen

pitkien suippokärkisten viiksiensä väliin. Luotsioppilas, jonka ikä
lähentelee jo kuuttakymmentä, mutta jonka suuri vatsa ja pulleat
posket kertovat elämän mukavuuden rakkaudesta, ei ole unohtanut
sikarejaan. Hän purasee poikki pään ja jakaa tulen timperin kanssa.
Toisella perämiehellä ei ole ainoatakaan savuketta. Hän, joka
toisinaan koetti ajaa tahtoaan läpi nyrkkivoimalla, mutta joka
tavallisesti aina sai matruuseilta selkäänsä, saa samaten kuin
muutkin, jakaa savukkeet niitten kanssa, joilla sellaisia on.

Tämä huomaavaisuus hellyttää häntä. Hän tahtoo näyttäytyä

solidaariselta. Ja selittää:

— Nyt emme enää ole perämiehiä ja matruuseja. Emme

päälliköitä ja työläisiä. Me olemme vankeja. Kaikki yhdenvertaisia.

Savukkeitten jakoa jatkuu. Tulitikut välähtävät. Ne luovat

voimakkaan, punaisen heijasteen ahavoittuneille kasvoille ja
känsäisille käsille. Mutta ne sammuvat heti. Pimeässä välkkyvät
vaan hehkuvat savukkeitten päät, kuin vaanivat peikonsilmät ja kevyt
savu nousee joukostamme ilmaan.

Ensimäinen perämies, joka ei ole tottunut suuriin ponnistuksiin ja

mielenliikutuksiin, ja jonka komea vartaloja miellyttävä käytös,
ulkonäkö ja huikenteleva luonne ovat tehneet hänestä Don Juanin,
nousee kalpeana komentosillalle. Hän näyttää olevan peloissaan.

— Mitä hän siellä tekee? kysytään.

 — Ehkä vaativat häntä luotsaamaan?

— Kyllä ne tuntevat paremmin nämä vedet kuin perämies, selittää

luotsi, jota "förstederska" kutsuu maailman kilteimmäksi mieheksi,
huolimatta siitä, että hän on naimisissa, eikä koskaan sylje lasiin,
joka hänelle tarjotaan.

Meitä alkaa vähän pelottaa. Ehkä on sittenkin jotain tekeillä?

Ehkä voivat venäläiset väijyä jossain Ahvenanmaan saaristossa,

ja hyökätä esiin sivuuttaessamme ne? Tai ehkäpä täällä on jossain
miinoja, ja mikä kamala kohtalo olisi seurauksena, jos sellaiselle
ajettaisiin?

Mutta yö on kylmä. Raikas tuuli puhaltaa läpi ohueitten pukimien.

Kaikki eivät ole osanneet varustaa itseään paksuilla päällystakeilla,
kuten molemmat luotsit, ensimäinen koneenkäyttäjä, eräs lämmittäjä
ja minä.

Puuttuupa toisilta aivan tarpeellisimmatkin. Tai sitten ovat

huonoimmissa työpukimissa. Mutta onneksi ovat toiset varustaneet
itseään useimmilla vaatekerroilla, joita sitten jakelevat hädänalaisille.

Pukeutumishommissa aletaan aprikoita koituneita vahinkoja.

Jokainen voi sormellaan osoittaa mitä on jäänyt jälelle. Eikä se

paljon ole.

Suurin osa lohduttaa itseään seuraavalla köykäisellä

lohdutuksella:

— Minulta meni kaikki! Kaikki, jok'ikinen vaatepala!

 Sitten alkaa yksityiskohtainen luetteleminen. Vaatekertoja,
housuja, takkeja, alusvaatteita, kultaa, hopeaa, arvoesineitä,
työtodistuksia j.n.e. loppumattomiin. Osa laivan kirjojakin on jäänyt.

Keittiömestari sai jo toistamiseen pistää valkeat virkapukunsa

sellaiseen pesoon, josta niitä ei koskaan saa, nauraa eräs joukosta.

— Ja kapteeni, hänelle surkeasti kävi! Kokonaista

seitsemänkymmentä paria sukkia kalojen lämpimiksi, selitti toinen.

Tiedonantoja jos jonkinlaisia satelee.

— Mutta "förstille" (ensim. koneenkäyttäjä) kävi vielä hullummin.

Kolmesataa markkaa vetehiselle. Puhdasta rahaa, jolla olisi saanut
jo aimo humalan viikon päiviksi! nauraa hytkyttää eräs aito
hämäläispiirteinen lämmittäjä, jonka vahvin puoli on veden ihailu.

— Ja ajatelkaas, puhuu pehmeäkielinen ja pullea keittiömestari,

miten tarkka "förstäderska" tahtoi olla. Hän poimi tyhjään
käsilaukkuunsa ainoastaan parin vanhoja kenkiä.

Siinä pakistessa tulee jollekin mieleen ruuat.

— Ai, huudahtaa keittiömestari naismaisella eleellä, hellalle jäi

kinkku käristymään. Se unohtui kun huusivat…

Tällainen äkkinäinen, hämmästyksen sekainen tunteenpurkaus

herättää yleistä iloa ja keittiömestarin kinkku-juttua venytellään pitkin
ja poikin.

Kestää sitä juttua. —