Speech acts

When a person utters a sequence of words, the speaker is often trying to achieve some effect with those words, an effect which might in some cases have boon accomplished by an alternative action. The words '(Jet back!' might convey the same notion as a push. A judge's statement: '1 sentence you to five years imprisonment' is not a mere string of words, bul lias the same effect as if the judge had inarched a man along In a prison, and locked him up. In brief, a number of utter­ances behave somewhat like actions. If this line of reasoning is taken further, one could argue that all utterances are acts of some type. Even an ordinary utterance such as 'Violets are blue' might be regarded as a special type of act, the act of making a statement:

(I slate that:) Violets are blue

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This overall approach is known as speech act theory, and it is another method by which philosophers and linguists have tried to classify the ways in which humans use language, in this case by treat­ing it as parallel to other actions which humans perform.

Proponents of speech act theory try, in the first place, to list the var­ious possible speech acts which a speaker might attempt to perform -statements, requests, queries, commands, promises, placing of bets, and so on. The lists vary from writer to writer, though the overall core tends to be similar. At the heart of the list come statements, questions and commands:

(I state that:) It's cold.

(I ask you:) What's the time?

(I command you:) Go away!

These are examples of direct speech acts: the act is expressed overtly by the most obvious linguistic means. But many speech acts are indirect, in that they possess the syntactic structure more usually associated with another act. For example, the following might all be intended as commands, yet only the first has the typical command structure:

Go to bed!

Isn 't it past your bedtime?

You should have been in bed long ago.

The first is therefore a direct speech act, but the second two are indi­rect speech acts.

But how do people know which speech act is intended, if each act can use the syntactic structure typically associated with one of the others? A possible answer is to specify happiness conditions or felicity conditions - circumstances under which it would be appro­priate to interpret something as a particular type of speech act. For example, if a genuine command has been given, the hearer must be physically capable of carrying it out, and must be able to identify the object(s) involved. Even this partial statement of the felicity condi­tions for commands would probably enable someone to identify 'Pick up that book!' and That book oughtn't to be on the floor' as genuine commands, and ‘Go jump in the lake!' and 'Gird up thy loins!' as pseudo-commands.

If we could fully identify the felicity conditions for each type of speech act, then we would have moved some way towards under­standing how humans use language.

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