OBAFEMI AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

COURSE: EGL 403- THE LANGUAGE OF DRAMA

QUESTION:

Discuss the following models of Speech Act Theory and attempt a criticism of the theory: Austinian Model John Searles Model Bach and Harnishs Model

AN ASSIGNMENT SUBMITTED BY CHRISTIAN MOSES CHIKA MATRIC NUMBER: EGL/2008/105 TO

DR. OLAOSUN

Abstract This work examines various aspect of Speech Act Theory with central focus on specific modelsthe Austinian model, John Searles and Bach and Harnishs model. It goes further underscore several objections and criticisms inherent in these models as postulated by some scholars. Conclusion is eventually drawn on the platform of the explications made by these theorists. 1.0 Introduction
The Speech Act Theory is one of the earliest theories proposed in Pragmatics. J.L. Austin in his popular book How to do Things with Words observes that whenever we make any utterance, we are performing an act. Such acts may include requesting, questioning, commanding and so forth. In general sense, we can know the act performed by a sentence when it is uttered. In this Unit, we shall be looking at how we perform acts through our utterances. We shall also look at some types of speech act. Every sentence we make is designed to perform certain functions. Such functions include, just informing people about something, warning, ordering somebody or a group of people to do something, questioning somebody about a fact, thanking somebody for a gift or an act of kindness, and so forth. When we utter statements, we expect our listeners to recognize and understand the functions such statements are meant to perform. For instance, when we ask a question, we expect our addressee to realize that we are requesting for information. If they failed to appreciate our intention, then we can say they have misunderstood us. This is what is termed as speech act. The theory of speech act therefore states that whenever we utter a statement, we are attempting to accomplish something with words (see Austin, 1962 and Searle, 1969).

2.1

Austins Theory of Speech Acts

Austin (1976) was the language philosopher that invented speech act theory. Austin claimed that we cannot understand what is meant by meaningful language if we only think that language is used to present facts about the world, facts that can either be true or false. Austin claimed that besides the description of reality we also use language to perform speech acts. We use the language to promise, ask, order, warn, request, etc.; speech acts

that cannot be evaluated either as true or false. As a consequence Austin at first made a classification of utterances into constatives and performatives. All language use comes to be viewed as having a performative and a constative dimension by Austin proceeds to investigate speech acts, i.e. those units of speech that have both a performative and a constative dimension. The speech act can be investigated under three different headings: (1) as meaningful speech, (2) as speech with a certain conventional force, and (3) as speech with a certain non-conventional effect. Here (1) can be regarded as the speech acts constative dimension while (2) and (3) can be regarded as together constituting its performative dimension. The first of these in turn can be investigated under three subheadings: (a) the production of the actual noises that are, so to speak, the vehicles of meaning, (b) the production of certain words in certain syntactical order and in a certain language by means of the production of those noises, and (c) the production of the latter to communicate a specific message, usually but not necessarily about a concrete situation. To introduce Austins terminology: the speech act as meaningful utterance is the locutionary act; as meaningful utterance with a certain conventional (performative) force, it is an illocutionary act; as meaningful utterance with a certain conventional force nonconventionally bringing about a certain effect, it is a perlocutionary act. The locutionary act is at one level the production of certain noises and as such it is dubbed the phonetic act; through the production of those noises the speaker intentionally produces words in syntactic arrangements and, in this respect, the act is called a phatic act; finally through the production of words in syntactic arrangements, with certain intentions and in certain contexts, it conveys certain messages and is in this respect dubbed a rhetic act. With regard to several of Austins critics suggest alternative ways of sectioning the speech act. There is need to assert with what Austin said about the various aspects of speech acts. This work proposes first of all to investigate the locutionary act under its three headings and then the illocutionary act. The perlocutionary act will be mentioned briefly and mainly to indicate the limits of the illocutionary act. With regard to the locutionary act, Austin claims that in order for there to be a speech act certain noises must be produced by the human voice: to say anything is ... always to perform the act of uttering certain noises..., and the utterance is a phone. This is

obviously untrue, since one can say something by means of writing, the production of graphemes. There are also many other vehicles (so to speak) of speech, other sign-systems such as semaphore, Morse code, smoke signals, etc. At one point however Austin allows that utterances can be in the form of writing. This is when he speaks of the utterance (in writing) of the sentence. It is clear however that he considers spoken language to be the paradigm of utterance and writing to be its rather crude reproduction. Before considering the phatic act, it is remarkable that, whereas phones are just noises, phonemes are the sound-units of a particular language. So we must not take Austin to be distinguishing between phonemic and non-phonemic noises at the level of the phonetic act. His phone is not yet a phoneme. Although Austin does not say this, what he goes on to say, as we shall see, calls for this. It is at the phatic level then that actual languages are first considered. Here one utters certain vocables or words, i.e. noises of certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulary, in a certain construction, i.e. conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar, with a certain intonation.. Here the phones become phonemes, which intentionally express words from the lexicon of a certain language, and are intentionally produced in an order prescribed by the syntactic rules of that language. The phones are produced as conforming to the phonemic, lexical and syntactic conventions of a certain language. Perhaps this does not mean that the phemes (as the results of phatic acts are called) are always well pronounced or well formed sentences. One does not cease to speak a language if one mispronounces words within certain limits (for instance, native English speakers do not fail to speak Russian merely because they cannot roll, or trill, their rs). Also, one does not cease to speak a language if one makes certain syntactic errors, again within certain limits (such as, for instance, If I would have been there, I would have seen it). These limits would probably be determined by the ability of another speaker of the language either mentally to correct the mistake or to get the intended sense in spite of the mistake. To pass from the phonetic act to the phatic act one must have certain intentions conforming to certain conventions: one must intend ones phones to express utterances that conform to the conventions of a certain language. The monkey that produces phones indistinguishable from those that the English speaker produces when he says go does not

say the word go because he did not intend his phonetic act to conform to the conventions of English. His act is not an intentional act in accordance with conventions. To show that merely uttering phones is not the same as uttering phonemes, words and phrases, consider the following example of Austins. One is asked the following trick question: If cold water is iced water, what is cold ink? One responds: Iced ink. Here one intentionally produces the phonemes /istink/ but the phones one produced could also be interpreted as the phonemes /istink/ although they were not intended as such. Or, since Austin does not speak in terms of phonemes, one would have uttered the phones that go to make up the utterance of I stink but one would not have uttered those words since one had not that intention as the context makes clear, the relevant context here being the fact that one was asked about iced liquids. This shows the importance of context of utterance: it is context, including the speakers intentions (i.e. total context), that determines which phatic act the phonetic act gives rise to. Intentionally conforming to linguistic conventions in specific contexts gives rise to rhetic acts which Austin describes as being generally to perform the act of using *a+ pheme or its constituents with a certain more or less definite sense and a more or less definite reference (which together are equivalent to meaning). It is clear, although Austin does not actually say so, that it is the total context that determines what rhetic act, if any, is performed in the performance of a phatic act. One can utter a pheme as an example of a piece of English, for instance, in which case it will not be a rheme (as the product of a rhetic act is called) since it will not be used to convey anything. Such a production of the pheme is a mere mention (although Austin does not use this term here). The context generally makes it clear how or whether the speaker intended to use the pheme. In order to clarify the nature of illocution and to explain why Austin says that the illocutionary force of an utterance is not to be construed as a consequence of the locutionary act of uttering it, also, we consider the perlocutionary act, which is said to be a consequence of the locutionary act, and to distinguish it from the illocutionary act. The perlocutionary act, as already mentioned, is the bringing about of a certain effect by means of the use of language, that effect being non-conventionally brought about. A man who says to his wife, for instance, I promise you a diamond ring may please her. There is no convention though whereby uttering I promise you a diamond ring, or

promising something, or even promising specifically good things (even diamond rings), pleases its audience. The effect was purely natural, we may say. There is however a convention, as already indicated, whereby one who utters I promise thereby promises. The utterance in question conventionally brings it about that a diamond ring was promised but non-conventionally brings it about that a woman was pleased. The conventional effect, to use provisionally the language of cause and effect, is the illocutionary effect and the nonconventional effect is the perlocutionary effect. The act was an illocutionary act of promising and a perlocutionary act of pleasing. However, Austin warns that we must avoid the idea ... that the illocutionary act is a consequence of the locutionary act. What we do import by the use of the nomenclature of illocution is a reference, not to the consequences (at least in any ordinary sense) of the locution, but to the conventions of illocutionary force as bearing on the special circumstances of the occasion of the issuing of the utterance.

2.2

Criticism of Austinian Model

For Austin (1962), the target of analysis was the total speech act in the total speech situation. He had a lot more to say about the former than the latter. Although for him speech acts are both events of producing pieces of language, vocables (speaking), and types of full-fledged doings (actions), Austin (1962) had almost nothing novel or constructive to say about speaking, beyond vague allusions to speechsounds, traditional grammar, and even more obscurely, meaning, sense and reference. He also had almost nothing to say about the nature of successful communication (or how it is achieved) beyond some brief remarks on illocutionary uptake. Indeed, the impression left is that communicative uses of language figure less prominently in Austins theorizing than ceremonial uses of language. It was the description of the speech event at various levels of abstraction and interaction (the various senses in which saying is doing) that fascinated him, especially the levels of the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. He never satisfactorily distinguished these categories, and could not even come up with a slogan for the illocutionary. He resorted instead to giving examples, some generalizations, and a few difficult-to-interpret comments such as a judge could tell, performed by conforming to a convention, can be made explicit by the performative formula. Perhaps the closest he came to characterizing illocutionary acts in general is with

his doctrine of felicity conditions, originally fashioned for the performative side of the performative-constative distinction. But even here only misfires capture conditions necessary for the successful performance of the acts, abuses merely render the act defective. And beyond a few illocutionary acts such as assertion and promising, Austin had little to say about success conditions on illocutionary acts. Austin, in fact, gives at least the appearance of being more concerned with speech acts as acts, embedded in social and physical contexts, than as speech. These shortcomings add up to why speech act theorists turned away from the Austinian paradigm. Besides, Basically Searles reason for rejecting the distinction is that, since meaning sometimes determines force, the distinction is not completely general. For instance, the meaning of I promise determines the force of that utterance act as an illocutionary act of promising. It is by virtue of its meaning that I promise counts as a promise. To examine the details of this criticism, Searle rightly characterizes Austin as committed to the view that Utterances which *are+ different tokens of the same locutionary type *can+ be tokens of different illocutionary types. Thus I am going to do it may sometimes be mere prediction and at other times be a promise without its meaning changing. Searle formulates the criticism as follows: it seems that [this distinction] cannot be completely general, in the sense of marking off two mutually exclusive classes of acts, because for some sentences at least, meaning, in Austins sense, determines (at least one) illocutionary force of the utterance of the sentence *Thus I hereby promise that I am going to do it+ may on occasion be other illocutionary acts as well, but it must at least be a promise. The example here is an explicit performative, an explicit promise. Austin of course would not deny that it will always be used with the force of a promise. Now Searles critical point here is that there is no locutionary act here.

3.1

Searles Model
Searle (1975) lists 12 differences between speech acts that can serve as bases for classification, but he uses only four of them to establish five classes of acts.

A.

ILLOCUTIONARY POINT- for instance, a request attempts to get hearer to do something; an assertive is a representation of how something is ; a promise is the undertaking of an obligation that speaker do something

B.

DIRECTION OF FIT- between the words uttered and the world they relate to: e,g. statements have a words-to-world fit because truth value is assigned on the basis of whether or not the words describe things as they are in the world spoken of; requests have a world-to-words fit because the world must be changed to fulfill speakers request.

C.

THE EXPRESSED PSCHOLOGICAL STATE: e.g. a statement that (P) expresses speakers belief that (p); a promise expresses speakers intention to do something; a request expresses speakers desire that hearer should do something.

D.

PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT: e.g. hearer to perform some act for a request; speaker to perform an action for a promise.

The five kinds of speech act Searle recognizes are: Assertives (statements ,averrings) it is called representatives in Searle 1975a. Assertives have a truth, show words-to-worlds fit, and epress speakerss belief that (P) Directives (commands, requests, entreaties) are attempts to get hearer to do something, therefore they show world-to-words fit and express speakers wish or desire that hearer to perform a certain Commisives (promises) commit speaker to some future course of action, so they show world-to-words fit, and speaker expresses the intention that speaker perform a certain action in the future. Expressives (congratulations, apologies, condolences) express speakers attitude to a certain state of affairs specified (if at all) in the propositional content (e.g. the bolded portion of I apologize for stepping on your toe). There is no direction of fit; a variety of different psychological states; and propositional content must be related to speaker or hearer. They simply presuppose the truth of the expressed proposition. (1975a: 357f).

Declarations

(appointings,

baptizings,

marryings,

etc)

bring

about

correspondence between the propositional content and the world; thus direction of fit is both words-to-words. They bring about the fit between word and world by the very fact of their successful performance Searle recognizes no psychological state for declaration.

3.2

Criticism of Searles Model

It is sure that Searles taxonomy was a big improvement in contrast to Austins theory. He made it possible to classify Illocutionary Acts into more detail. What we know now about different criteria gives us the possibility to arrange Illocutionary Acts to particular categories. But again, problems can be found in Searles ideas. The most obvious one is the problem of overlapping categories. For example the duplication of direction of fit in directives and commissives. Both have world to word Direction of Fit, as in both types the speaker wants that something happens. Therefore, a complete classification that can be used conventially was not set up by Searle as well. As a consequence, other linguists continued the investigation of Speech Acts.

4.1

Bach and Harnishs Model

Bach and Harnish (1979) completely rejected Searles program for making constitutive rules central, and proposed to substitute a carefully worked out version of Strawsons earlier, intention-centered theory. They followed Strawson in distinguishing between ceremonial acts like christening and marrying, for which convention is taken to be the primary illocutionary mechanism, and the case of non-ceremonial acts like asking and stating, which they label COMMUNICATIVE, and for which they assume that intention is crucial to the accomplishment of the illocutionary act. Their contribution was three-fold: 1. to suggest a very general SPEECH ACT SCHEMA (SAS) for communicative illocutionary acts, 2. to show how inferences based on MUTUAL CONTEXTUAL BELIEFS (MCBs) play a role in communicative speech acts, and 3) to make detailed use of Grices notion of conversational implicature in fleshing out the theory.

The most general form of SAS consists of the following ordered steps: 3. a. S is uttering e. b. S means by e. c. S is saying so-and-so. d. S is doing such-and-such. In each phase of the interpretation, the derived inference follows from the previous conclusion plus general rules. Premise (3a) follows from hearing the speaker utter e, plus the hearers knowledge of the language, and (3b) follows from (3a) plus the knowledge that in this language, e means Then (3c) follows from (3b), supplemented with the assumption that S is speaking literally plus the knowledge that there are certain MCBs in the context in which e has been uttered. The reasoning to the conclusion (3d)that S is doing such-andsuch in uttering einvolves the previous conclusion, other MCBs, and what Bach and Harnish (1979:7) call the COMMUNICATIVE PRESUMPTION: Communicative Presumption: The mutual belief in CL [the linguistic community]that whenever a member S says something in L to another member H, he is doing so with some recognizable illocutionary intent. The way this works for Bach and Harnish is that the sentences of L belong, as a matter of locution, to a limited range of sentence types (see below) that are formally connected with the mood of the sentence, and that knowledge of L includes knowledge that the locutionary act of uttering a sentence of a certain sentence type is only compatible with the expression of certain sorts of feelings. Uttering a declarative sentence that expresses the proposition p, for example, is only compatible with a belief on the part of the speaker that p, and is therefore suitable only to illocutionary acts that fit with the speakers having such a belief, e.g., asserting that p, stating that p, and so on. Various additional assumptions are made to accommodate non-literal (e.g., sarcastic or metaphorical) speech acts, and still others are needed for INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS (see below). As with most theories that take inferencing to be a central notion in deriving the force of utterances, quite a few steps are needed to work out the illocution in Bach and Harnishs system.

5.0

Conclusion

The work looked at the theory of speech act as proposed by J.L. Austin and .R. Searle amongst others. We examined performative verbs used in performative utterances, the types of speech act, and the felicity conditions that have to be met before a speech act can be successful. Lastly, we looked at direct and indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts are particularly considered as being important because their meaning is arrived at through inference, since the surface form does not indicate the meaning. Thus each time we make an utterance, we are using them to perform certain acts. Such acts may be directly stated by the speaker or indirectly stated. Certain verbs are used to explicitly signal that an utterance is meant to perform an act. They are referred to as performative verbs, while the utterance in which they occur are called performative utterance. For any utterance to be judged as sincere, it has to fulfill certain felicity conditions. The meaning of utterances is not always directly reflected in their surface forms. Some utterances have surface forms that differ from the intention of the speaker. These are called indirect speech acts.

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REFERENCES

Austin, J. L. (1962): Performative-Constative, translated from the French by G.J. Warnock, in Searle, ed., The Philosophy of Language, 13-22. Originally in Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie no. IV, La philosophie analytique (Les Editions de Minuit.) Austin, J. L. (1976): Philosophical Papers. Third edition. Edited by J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. Austin, J. L.(1962): How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Second edition. Edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975. First published in 1962. Bach, K. and R. M. Harnish (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts Kevin, Halion (1989):Deconstruction and Speech Act Theory: A Defence of the Distinction between Normal and Parasitic Speech Acts Searle J.R. (1979): Expression and Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Searle, John R. 1975a. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In Gunderson (ed.) pp.344-69. Reprinted in Language in Society 5, 1976:1-23 and Searle 1979. Searle, John R. 1975b: Indirect Speech Acts. In Cole and Morgan (eds) 1975:59-82. Reprinted in Searle 1979. Searle, John. (1969): Speech Acts. London: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. (1968): Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts. The Philosophical Review 77, 405-424. Searle, John R. (1979): Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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