Introduction

On the night of the fireworks display to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Essex University, I
went out with my flatmate, Laura to watch the colourful display of fireworks. As we walked
through Square 3, a young lady walked up to us with a tray of marshmallows and chocolates
in steaks. Smiling sweetly, she said:

1.1 Lady: Hello, would you like a steak?

Me: (Taking one and biting into it) Sure! Thank you.

Lady: Its two for a pound.

I almost choked on the marshmallow. I had interpreted her Hello, would you like a steak?
as an invitation to eat one for free and not a request to buy one. This interpretation was
triggered by the context of our conversation. It was a fireworks night put together by the
Student Union to celebrate 50years of its existence so it was normal to think they were
giving out free nibbles to students. That was obviously not the case. Unfortunately, I didnt
have any money on me so I continued with the play on pragmatics.

Me: (Loud enough for Laura, my flatmate to hear) I havent got any money.

My response was both a request for Laura to help upset my unintentionally acquired bill
and also a plea for the seller to let me off without paying if possible. I expected responses
like:

Lady: Not to worry. I have sold a lot today. I would make it up somehow.

OR

Laura: Dont worry. I would take care of it.

But when none of them took the bait, I tried harder.

Me: (Turning to Laura) Do you have a pound?

She brought out a coin and handed it to the seller.

Me: Thank you.

Laura: No worries.

Although I didnt ask her to pay my bill but by simply asking if she had the exact money I
needed to pay for the steaks, she understood that my question was actually a request for
her to pay my bills. This is what the theory of speech acts is concerned with: the fact that
language can be used to do things or get people to do things.

This essay discusses how useful Searles taxonomy of speech acts is, as a theory of
language use. First, I would give a brief history of the speech act theory, then I would
present Searles taxonomy of speech acts and the problems that have plagued it. Lastly, I
would discuss the relevance of Searles taxonomy and analyse some speech act data from all
around Colchester Campus, Essex University, using Searles taxonomy. Three thousand
words is a bit restrictive for an essay of this topic but I would keep my definitions of
concepts concise and precise and would give only one example for each concept to make
the most of my limit.

History of the Speech Act Theory

It is possible to view the term Speech Acts in two ways: as a phrase and as a main clause.
As a phrase, it would consist of the adjective speech describing the noun acts to mean the
kind of acts done with speech. As a sentence (clause), it would consist of a noun subject
speech and a verb predicate acts. It would be a statement that speech does things (acts).
Most likely, the first is what J. R Searle meant when he termed J.L Austins original concept
of illocutionary acts as Speech Acts.

Although the Speech Act Theory is generally associated with John Searle, its origin can be
traced to 1955 when the philosopher, J.L Austin in his William James lectures at Harvard
University proposed that sentences do more than just describe states of affairs in the world
and that some sentences cannot be tested for their truth properties. He postulated that
sentences can be used to perform actions. This, he called the illocutionary act. His series of
William James lectures were published posthumously in 1962 in a book called How to Do
Things with Words. Unfortunately, Austin didnt live long enough to see his ideas become
popular. It was Searle, who was a student under Austin, who worked on his ideas and came
up with the Speech Act Theory which has become a relevant and popular linguistic theory
today (Mey, 2001: 92-93, Huang, 2007: 93).

Searles Taxonomy of Speech Acts.

Searle proposed four processes involved in a speech act: the utterance acts which has to
do with the uttering of words and which is synonymous with Austins locutionary acts, the
propositional acts which has to do with the content of the utterance and involves referring
and predicating, the illocutionary acts which involves the action of promising, questioning,
commanding and stating, etc. This is perfectly in sync with Austins own illocutionary acts
and it is the most important concept in the speech act theory such that it is what comes to
the minds of many people when speech act is mentioned. Lastly, Searle brings in Austins
perlocutionary acts which are the effects of the illocutionary acts of the speakers on the
hearers. It seems that Searle only split Austins locutionary acts into utterance acts and
propositional acts. It is however, pertinent to note that these processes naturally occur
together and not in isolation of one another. For example:

1.2 There is a policeman by the corner.

In saying 1.2 above, I would have performed the utterance act of uttering words, the
propositional content act of referring and predicating, the illocutionary act of asserting
or warning and the perlocutionary act of frightening the hearer and making him run
away or some other effect depending on the situation.
Searle criticized Austins classification of illocutionary acts into verdictives, expositives,
exercutives, behabitives and commissives because these categories overlapped and
sometimes included elements that were not compatible with his definition of the
categories. In Searles article A classification of illocutionary acts, he classified
illocutionary acts into representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and
declarations. (1977: 34)
Representatives: These are what Austin originally called constatives. Here the speaker is
committed to the truth of the expressed proposition. Representatives include: stating,
concluding, reporting, asserting and claiming. For example:
1.3 Searle propounded the speech acts theory.

Directives: In directives, the speaker tries to stir or direct the hearer towards a
particular act. They include: requesting, ordering, questioning, and advising. 1.4 below is
a directive.

1.4 Do you mind stepping aside for a while?

Commissives: These express an obligation on the part of a speaker. They commit the
speaker to a future course of action and include: promising, offering, threatening,
pledging, vowing. Consider the following:

1.5 I will be back.

Expressives: Expressives, as the name suggests, express a psychological state of the

speaker. They include: apologizing, blaming, thanking, praising, congratulating,
welcoming. For example:

1.6 Congratulations on the birth of your baby.

Declaratives: These are unique because they have the power to change the world
immediately after they are altered. They are used for excommunicating, pronouncing
judgements, declaring war or freedom, firing from employment or christening.

1.7 I declare tomorrow a public holiday (said by the president of a country).

Searles taxonomy above is based on four dimensions: the illocutionary point, the
direction of fit, the expressed psychological state and the propositional content
(Huang, 2007: 106). Worthy of note here is the fact that a single utterance can have
several illocutionary forces. 1.5, for instance, could be a promise, threat or warning.
However, Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs) like stress, intonation
contour, punctuation, mood of the verb and most importantly the context in which
the utterance is said can help the hearer know what illocutionary act is intended.
 Searles Indirect Speech Acts
The five types of speech acts discussed above can be placed in two broad categories called
direct and indirect speech acts. Direct speech acts is the one Austin concerned himself with.
It is when the utterance form has a one-on-one relationship with the illocutionary act
performed by the sentence. Austin proposed the explicit and implicit performatives when
an illocutionary act is performed directly. Explicit involves the use of a performative verb
(which Searle preferred to call a Speech Act Verb henceforth SAV) that points to the
illocution of the utterance. Contrastively, implicit performatives do not make use of such
SAVs yet the illocutionary act of the sentence is still obvious because it is a direct speech act.

1.8 Stop that! direct(an imperative used to give an order), implicit(no SAV)
1.9 I command you to stop. direct(same as above), explicit(command is an SAV)

Searle builds on this by postulating that there is not always a one-on-one

relationship between form and meaning (illocution). This is called indirect speech
acts. Other scholars who also pointed out that the same utterance can be made
directly and indirectly are: Sadock 1970, 1972, Gordon and Lakoff 1971, Green 1975
(Geis, 1995: 7).The most common indirect speech act form is the directives
(Levinson, 1983: 264). For politeness sake, most requests do not take their normal
imperative form. They instead take the interrogative or the declarative (sentence
type, not speech act type). Commissives like offers and invitations also use the
interrogative indirectly instead of the imperative or declarative forms they are
meant to take. Declarative speech acts are almost always direct. For instance, in 1.1
above, Do you have a pound? is a request to pay my bill, not for information.

2.0 Do you wanna come to my party after classes? an interrogative used to invite instead
of the declarative You are invited to my party after classes.

It is not the case that the hearer finds it difficult to understand the illocutionary
point of an indirect speech act. The speakers illocutionary act is calculable by the
context, Gricean cooperative principle (especially the relevance maxim), the shared
background knowledge of the speaker and the hearer (linguistic and non linguistic)
and some inferences on the part of the hearer (interlocutor). Moreover, Searle
points out there are two types of indirect acts. One: An indirect act which has both a
primary, non-literal meaning that has to be inferred and a secondary, literal meaning
that needs no inference. Two: An indirect act that has just one, non-literal, inferable
meaning. The example below would explain this point better.

2.1 X: Lets go swimming at noon.

Y: I have to watch over my baby sister.

2.2 Can you please be quiet?

Searle (1975: 61) believes the utterance of Y in 2.1 has a primary act of rejecting an
offer and an indirect act of asserting what Y has to do. However, 2.2 can only be seen
as an indirect request. It is not questioning the hearers ability to be quiet.
Relevant felicity conditions, discussed in the next section, can also make indirect
speech act utterances to be recognised and understood.

Searles Felicity Conditions and Rules

According to Geis, One of Searles (1969) most important contributions to speech
act theory was his development of the Austinian concept of felicity. (1995: 6).
Felicity conditions (Austins term) are those necessary for the successful production
of a speech act. When all the conditions are met, then the speech act is happy and if
not(an infelicitous act), then it is a misfire or abuse (Austin, 1975: 13, 15). Searle
called condition-meeting speech acts, non-defective and non-condition meeting
speech acts, defective. Searle proposed nine conditions for promising which he
grouped under four types of conditions namely: preparatory, propositional content,
sincerity and essential conditions. He further differentiated between regulatory rules
that only regulate an activity and constitutive rules that themselves make up a game
or activity. He posits that speech act rules are of a constitutive nature and can be
drawn from the felicity conditions. Hence, the rules for promising are also
preparatory, propositional content, sincerity and essential rules (Searle, 1991, Searle,
1969, Huang, 2007, Mey, 2001, Yule, 1996, Collavin, 2011). He also gave conditions
and rules for requesting but space would fail me if I discuss these elaborately.

Problems and Critique of Searles Speech Act Taxonomy

Every theory has a loophole and attracts criticism. This section looks at some of the
problems associated with the Searlean taxonomy. Lets start with his term Speech Acts
which has been seen as misleading because the actions (illocutionary acts) carried out by
speech can also be done non-linguistically or non-verbally. For example, I can use signs to
request that someone should shut the door. I give credit to Geis (1995: 13-14) for my next
example. Suppose a company captain has called for volunteers to reconnoitre behind
enemy lines and that a soldier is interested in volunteering for this mission. She might
volunteer by taking a step forward, raising an arm (non-verbal) or by saying Ill do it or I
volunteer (verbal). They would all still have the same force of volunteering. Hence, Geis
believes that speech acts are not just linguistic but also social and a better term for speech
acts should be communicative acts because communication is social and can be verbal or
non-verbal. Furthermore, in Searles felicity conditions for promising and requesting, only
the propositional content condition is linguistic; the others are non-linguistic but social
(1995: 12, 15).
 Searle has also being accused of only systematizing Austins principles (Levinson, 1983:
238) and that some of his classes of speech acts are alike with Austins. For instance,
commissives are common to both of them (Mey, 2001: 124) and Searles directives seem to
be only a change of name of Austins exercitives. In a linguistic theory such as the one Searle
proposed, context is indispensable. For instance, the utterance It is going to rain would be
a complaint if the rain would affect my planned activities. It would be a warning if I say it to
someone who is planning a picnic and it would only be a statement of fact if said by the
weather forecast. Also, the difference between a promise and a vow is the social
(institutional) context of its utterance. It is true that Searle mentioned context as important
in calculating indirect speech acts but he doesnt include a contextual factor in his felicity
conditions. He didnt explore all possible contexts in his analysis of utterances but used ideal
contexts that suited the purpose of his analysis.

Since language is universal, good language theories should be universal. Another problem
with Searles classification is that it does not transcend cultures and languages. Rosaldo
(1982) observed that the promising act is not found among the Ilongots of the Philippines
because there is a general lack of interest in sincerity and truth in that community. Harris
(1984: 134-135) also noted that the speech act of thanking is absent in the Australian
aboriginal language, Yolngu.

Additionally, every utterance is part of a larger conversation or discourse and the position
of an utterance in a discourse determines, to some extent, the illocutionary force of that
utterance. If, for instance, an utterance A You stole a pen? occurs after an utterance B I
stole a pen yesterday. Utterance A would then be taken as a request for confirmation or as
an expression of surprise and not as a request for information. One flaw of Searle and other
speech act theorists is that, they extracted the utterance from its discourse and analysed it
in isolation. Finally, Searle claimed that his taxonomy of speech acts was based on twelve
criteria (Searle 1977, 1979) but in reality he used only four of these (Mey 2001: 119). These
four criteria, I have already mentioned above.

Relevance of the Searlean Taxonomy

In spite of its seemingly numerous flaws, Searles theory of speech act is still the most
popular speech act theory today. His taxonomy of speech act is useful as a language theory
so much that although, it was originally the concern of philosophers, many linguists have
delved into the study of speech acts today. Contrary to Levinsons view, Sbisa (2009a: 229)
sees Searles principles as diverging sharply from Austins. His brilliant observation that
language has an illocutionary character and that whenever we use language something is
done, is yet to be disproved. Some languages may not have some of Searles speech acts but
every language has some speech acts (at least assertions, if not any other) which makes
Searles theory really a universal one. His indirect speech act has become truer with time.
We rarely express ourselves using direct speech acts, especially explicitly with speech act
verbs as will be seen in the next section where contemporary use of speech acts is analysed.
 Analysis of Utterances Using Searles Taxonomy.
This section analyses some speech acts used by members of Essex University, Colchester
Campus in November, 2014. I have left out the ones I have used in my examples above
already to avoid repetition.

Utterance Context Sentence Primary Indirect Act Secondary Indirect Act

Type
I am trying Said to some Declarative. Request to be Statement or
to study. noisy quiet(Directive). assertion(Representative).
flatmates.
You are not Said by Dr. Declarative a.Request that phone Questioning for information
texting on Rebecca Clift with a tag should be put (Directive).
your in her question. away(directive).
phone, are Pragmatics b.Request for an
you? class. apology for texting in
class(directive).
You are Said to a Declarative. Request for an Assertion (Representative).
late. student who explanation and/or an
is late for a apology(Directive)
meeting with
another
student.

These do Said by an Declarative. Offer (Commissive). Assertion (Representative).

not kill African
anyone. student while
offering
some African
cashew nuts
to a British
student.
These Posted in the Declarative. a.Invitation to come to Statement of fact
biscuits are Student come for the open day (Representative)
not going Union (Commissive).
to eat website as b.Offer of cookies
themselves. the caption (Commissive).
of a picture
of a can of
cookies as
they invited
 students for
their SU open
day.
I can take a Said by me to Declarative. a.Offer to deliver a Assertion(Representative)
message. my flatmates message to my
friend who flatmate for her
came to visit (Commissive)
her and met b.Request/Suggestion
her absence. that she should leave a
message(Directive).
Did you Said by a Interrogative Request for an Questioning for
understand student to explanation of the information(Directive).
Deixis and another after concepts(Directive).
Anaphora a pragmatics
? class.

Conclusion
In this essay, I have given a history of the speech act theory and stated Searles taxonomy of speech
acts. I have considered Searles indirect speech acts and felicity conditions and rules. Finally, I have
discussed the problems of Searles theory, then noted the usefulness of Searles taxonomy of speech
acts as a linguistic theory using some recent speech act utterances in Essex University, Colchester as
a part of my basis.
 Bibliography
Austin, J. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. (S. Edition) New York: Oxford University
Press.

Collavin, E. (2011). Speech Acts. In Bublitz, W. & Norrick, N (Eds.), Foundations of

Pragmatics. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyten GmbH & co.

Geis, M. (1995). Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction. New York: Cambridge
University Press.

Harris, S. (1984). Culture and Learning: Tradition and Education in North-East Arnhem Land.
Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Huang, Y. (2007). Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mey, J. (2001). Pragmatics An Introduction. U.K and U.S.A: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Rosaldo, M. (1982) in Huang, Y. (2007). Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sbisa, M. (2009a) Speech Act Theory. In Verschueren, J. and Ostman, J. (Eds.). Key notions
for Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Searle, J. (1970). Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. New York: Cambridge
University Press.

Searle, J. (1975). Indirect Speech Acts. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics,
vol 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.

Searle, J. (1977). A Classification of Illocutionary Acts. In Rogers, A., Wall, B. and Murphy, J.
(Eds.), Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions and
Implicatures. Washington D.C: Centre for Applied Linguistics.

Searle, J. (1979). Expression and Meaning Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (1991). What is a Speech Act? In Davis, S. (Ed.), Pragmatics A Reader. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. (1991). Indirect Speech Acts. In Davis, S. (Ed.), Pragmatics A Reader. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.