Foundations of Speech Act Theory

Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives

S.L. Tsohatzidis, S.L. Tsohatzidis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134866984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Foundations of Speech Act Theory investigates the importance of speech act theory to the problem of meaning in linguistics and philosophy. The papers in this volume, written by respected philosophers and linguists, significantly advance standards of debate in this area.
Beginning with a detailed introduction to the individual contributors, this collection demonstrates the relevance of speech acts to semantic theory. It includes essays unified by the assumption that current pragmatic theories are not well equipped to analyse speech acts satisfactorily, and concludes with five studies which assess the relevance of speech act theory to the understanding of philosophical problems outside the area of philosophy of language.

PART I

Speech acts and semantic theory

1 Illocutionary acts and linguistic meaning

William P. Alston

This paper is a presentation of the basic ideas of a book I am hoping to complete soon, with the above title. The central idea of the book is that sentence meaning is illocutionary act potential. The fact that a given sentence has a given meaning is the fact that the sentence has the potential, the capacity to be (standardly) used to perform illocutionary acts of a certain type.

This view was, so far as I know, first unveiled in public by myself in Alston (1963) and (1964b). But it has received little development in print since that period. It was embraced by John Searle (1969), but he has done little to spell out a theory of linguistic meaning in these terms.¹ For myself, though I have published a few articles that present pieces of the view (see Alston 1974, 1977), I have, I fear, been too preoccupied with other things to bring the project to completion up to now. This article is by way of a progress report and, I hope, a harbinger of things to come.

Sentence Meaning and Illocutionary Act Potential

I will begin by elucidating the ‘illocutionary-act-potential (IAP) thesis’, which I will canonically formulate as follows:

(I) A sentence’s having a given meaning consists in its having a certain illocutionary act potential.

To elucidate this I need to say something about three concepts, (a) sentence meaning, (b) illocutionary act, and (c) potential.

Sentence meaning

I do not intend to be employing any novel, outré, or technical concept of the meaning of a sentence. I mean to be working with the concept that is used in giving a semantic description of a language and, in so doing, assigning meanings to various sentences of the language. In view of persistent confusion about language and the semantics thereof, it might be well to make it explicit that I am speaking of the meanings of sentence types (sentence-sized units of a language), rather than so-called sentence ‘tokens’ (what is produced by speakers when they use a certain sentence (type)). My concept deals with language, not with speech.² Moreover, in speaking of sentence meaning I am concerned with linguistic meaning – the meaning possessed by units of language, where a language is an abstract structure that is employed by people in speech – in contrast to ‘speaker meaning’, what a speaker means by what he said, and in contrast with ‘utterance meaning’, the meaning to be ascribed to particular utterances or sentence ‘tokens’, if, indeed, there is a coherent concept of this latter that is distinct from speaker meaning.

It may help if I list a few ‘axioms’ that I take to ‘locate’ the concept of sentence meaning on the conceptual map.

(A1) The fact that a sentence has a certain meaning is what enables it to play a distinctive role (enables it to be used to convey a certain ‘message’ or ‘content’) in communication.

(A1) will eventually be further developed by identifying the ‘role’ and the ‘conveyance of a certain message’ with the performance of an illocutionary act of a certain sort. As so understood, (A1) is very close to the IAP thesis (I).

(A2) Knowledge of the meaning of the sentence uttered is the linguistic knowledge a hearer needs in order to understand what is being said.

This can be viewed as the same basic idea as (A1) viewed from the standpoint of the hearer rather than the speaker. (A1) says that a sentence’s having a certain meaning is what makes it suitable to be used to say such-and-such, and (A2) says that knowing that the sentence has that meaning is (the linguistic part of) what enables a hearer to know that such-and-such is what is being said.

Note the restriction to linguistic knowledge. In most cases knowledge of the language is not sufficient for grasping what is being said. If the sentence has more than one meaning, like ‘He got a good hand’, the hearer will have to use contextual clues to determine which of those meanings is being exploited in this utterance. Moreover the meaning of a sentence usually does not suffice to determine singular reference. To grasp what is being said in an utterance of ‘I will like the house when I get used to it’, the hearer will have to know the identity of the speaker, the time of utterance, and which house is being referred to. All of this is information over and above what meaning(s) the sentence has in the language.

(A3) The meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its constituents plus relevant facts about its structure.

This is a fundamental principle of linguistics. I will later turn it on its head to indicate how one moves from sentence meaning to word meaning. (For a word to have a certain meaning is for it to make a distinctive contribution to the meanings of sentences in which it figures.) One might think that I am trying to have it both ways – taking sentence meaning to be derivative from word meaning and taking word meaning to be derivative from sentence meaning. Surely I can’t get away with that! The way to resolve this puzzle is to distinguish different orders of priority. Word meaning is prior to sentence meaning in the order of the explanation of particular facts (we explain the fact that a particular sentence means what it does by appealing to the meanings of its constituents plus its structure). While sentence meaning is prior to word meaning in the order of conceptual analysis, or explication. We explain the concept of word meaning in terms of the contribution a word makes to the meaning of sentences. We find this distinction of orders of priority in many areas. Ultimate physical particles are prior to macro-objects in the order of the explanation of facts: we explain the properties and behaviour of macro-objects in terms of the properties and behaviour of micro-particles. But our concepts of micro-particles are built up on the basis of antecedently grasped concepts of macro-objects, partly by the use of analogies, and partly in terms of the role micro-particles play in theories and explanations of macro-phenomena. Again, in theology God is prior to creatures in the order of explanation – most fundamentally in the explanation of their existing. Whereas our concept of God is derived from our concepts of creatures by analogy.

(A4) The truth conditions of a statement are at least partly determined by the meaning of the sentence used to make that statement.

Where knowing the meaning of the sentence is all that is necessary for determining what statement is made, that determination can be complete. This may be the case with general statements like Hexagons have six sides. But where singular reference (‘I’m hungry’) and multivocality (‘Jim is still running’) are involved, the semantics of the sentence does not suffice to determine truth conditions, just because it does not suffice for the determination of what is being asserted. But the meaning still plays a major role.

Illocutionary acts

Now for the concept of an illocutionary act This term, due originally to J.L. Austin (1962), is often seriously underexplained for a technical term. The usual practice is to give a list of examples and leave it up to the reader to form an intuitive concept on that basis. That is pretty much what I will do here, though with some supplementary indications. For a pretheoretical demarcation of illocutionary act concepts I rely on our familiar indirect discourse form. We have a large assortment of devices for making explicit what someone said (where this is distinguished from what sentence he uttered), the ‘content’ of the utterance, what ‘message’ it conveyed. Here is a small sample.

(1) U (utterer) asserted (admitted, replied, insisted…) that the window was open.

(2) U promised Jones to take him to the meeting.

(3) U asked Smith for a match.

(4) U predicted that the war would be over soon.

(5) U assured Robinson that he had no intention of leaving.

(6) U remarked that grocery prices are rising.

(7) U expressed his intention of becoming a candidate.

(8) U expressed considerable resentment of Jones’ behaviour.

(9) U called the batter safe.

(10) U congratulated Smith on his appointment.

(11) U seconded the motion.

(12) U urged Smith to stick with his plan.

Each of these reports involves an action verb – ‘insist’, ‘predict’, ‘urge’, ‘congratulate’ – followed by a ‘content-specifying’ phrase. I will follow Searle (1969: 30) in taking the action verb to specify the ‘illocutionary force’ of the utterance, while the ensuing phrase specifies the ‘propositional content’. I want to emphasize that on my conception illocutionary acts include both of these aspects. There is a tendency in many writers on the subject to restrict attention to illocutionary force and to exclude propositional content from the illocutionary act rubric. But if illocutionary acts are the acts reported by typical indirect discourse locutions, then they include the carrying of the propositional content, as well as doing something with a certain illocutionary force.

Many of my readers will be aware that Austin himself characterized the ‘rhetic act’ (‘performance of an act of using … vocables with a certain more-or-less definite sense and reference’ (1962: 95)), which he distinguished from the illocutionary act, in terms of indirect discourse.

But the rhetic act is the one we report, in the case of assertions, by saying ‘He said that the cat was on the mat’, ‘He said he would go’, ‘He said I was to go’ (his words were ‘You are to go’). This is the so-called ‘indirect speech’.

(1962: 96–7)

However I cannot see that Austin did a satisfactory job of making the rhetic-illocutionary act distinction.³ What difference is there between ‘He said that the cat was on the mat’ and ‘He admitted (remarked, insisted, replied …) that the cat was on the mat’, except for degree of specificity? I think we have to say that the examples Austin tended to give of rhetic acts are simply illocutionary acts with very unspecific illocutionary force. Indeed, sometimes they are not so unspecific. Thus one of his contrasts between phatic (roughly uttering a certain sentence) and rhetic acts is: ‘He said “Is it in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Ways of doing things with words: An introduction
• PART I. Speech acts and semantic theory
• PART II. Speech acts and pragmatic theory
• PART III. Speech acts and grammatical structure
• Bibliography
• Index