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 Searle’s Model

Bach and Harnish’s Model

AN ASSIGNMENTSUBMITTED

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

models—the Austinian model, John Searle’s and Bach and Harnish’s 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 Austin’s 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

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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 act’s 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 Austin’s 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 non-

conventionally 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 Austin’s 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

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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 r’s). 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 one’s 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

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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 Austin’s. 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 /ist’ink/ but the phones one produced could also be

interpreted as the phonemes /i’stink/ 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 speaker’s 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

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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 non-

conventional 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

Austin’s 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

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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 Searle’s 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 Austin’s 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 Searle’s critical

point here is that there is no locutionary act here.

3.1 Searle’s 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.

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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 speaker’s request.

C. THE EXPRESSED PSCHOLOGICAL STATE: e.g. a statement that

(P) expresses speaker’s belief that (p); a promise expresses speaker’s intention

to do something; a request expresses speaker’s 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 speakers’s belief that (P)

Directives (commands, requests, entreaties) are attempts to

get hearer to do something, therefore they show world-to-words fit and

express speaker’s 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 speaker’s 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).

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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 Searle’s Model

It is sure that Searle’s taxonomy was a big improvement in contrast to Austin’s

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 Searle’s 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 Harnish’s Model

Bach and Harnish (1979) completely rejected Searle’s program for making

constitutive rules central, and proposed to substitute a carefully worked out version of

Strawson’s 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

Grice’s notion of conversational implicature in fleshing out the theory.

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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 hearer’s 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-and-

such in uttering e—involves 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 speaker’s 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

Harnish’s system.

5.0 Conclusion

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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 Sbisà. 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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