Isabela Iecu-Fairclough

PRAGMATICS 2 SPEECH ACTS

From: Isabela Iecu-Fairclough Pragmatics Workbook (book in preparation, Editura Universitii din Bucureti)
Poirot to Captain Hastings: Hastings, my friend, promise me something. Hastings: Whats that, Poirot? Poirot: Never, but never must Chief Inspector Japp hear that I investigated such a case. Hastings: Mums the word, old boy.

Speech acts are verbal actions, actions performed by means of utterances. In uttering a speech act, I do something with my words: I make an apology or a promise, I request an interlocutor to tell me the time or to open a window, I congratulate or greet a friend, and if I am authorized to do so I can even baptize child, declare a meeting open, pronounce two people husband and wife. Speech act theory originated in the 1950s, in a series of lectures which the British philosopher J. L. Austin gave at Oxford University between 1952 and 1954, and later on at Harvard in 1955, collected posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962). Austins ideas were taken up and developed later on by the American philosopher J. R. Searle in several books, most notably in his famous Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969). Austin originally drew attention to a class of verbs which he called performatives and distinguished them from so-called constatives. In uttering a constative, we aim to describe the world (The weather is nice. Pluto is a planet). Constative speech acts involve the utterance of statements that can be true or false, depending on how the proposition expressed corresponds or fails to correspond to an objectively existing state of affairs in the world (e.g., Pluto is no longer considered a planet, so the utterance would be false now). To utter a performative speech act ( I now pronounce you husband and wife, uttered by an authorized person in appropriate circumstances) is not to report or describe some pre-existing state of affairs, but to do something, or perform an action, i.e., instate a new reality. In other words, instead of reporting or describing some pre-exiting fact or event, such utterances name the act that they perform and perform it at the same time. When two people are pronounced husband and wife during a marriage ceremony, a new reality, that of the marriage, has come into being. It follows that performative utterances cannot be evaluated as true or false because there is no pre-existing state of affairs that they can be compared with. There are many examples of utterances that are not descriptions of events: I promise that I will be there. I (hereby) agree that I was wrong. I apologize. I warn you that plagiarism will not be tolerated. I bet you a pound that it will rain tomorrow. I name this ship The Queen Elizabeth. You are fired. We find the defendant guilty. Instead of truth-conditions, Austin speaks of felicity conditions, i.e. conditions that the extralinguistic context, the participants and the utterance must satisfy if a successful (felicitous) speech act is to be performed. Highly conventional acts (such as those involved in ceremonies of

marriage, baptizing, etc.) require for instance that the persons involved have the authority to perform the acts, that the circumstances (e.g. place) be appropriate, etc. Even ordinary speech acts like promising, apologizing and warning, which everyone can perform and which do not require any special authority or institutional circumstances, have felicity conditions: for a promise to be non-defective, the speaker must intend to carry out the act, etc. It is essential to note that it is possible to do things with words without using performative verbs (e.g. No trespassing! Bastard!, etc.). What are the conditions that have to be fulfilled for a performative utterance such as I now pronounce you husband and wife to be felicitous? Austin lists the following: A (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect. (ii) The persons and the circumstances must be appropriate, as specified in the procedure. B. The procedure must be executed both correctly and completely: the words must be the right one and the whole procedure must be carried out. C. Often, (i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, and (ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must do so. Indeed, in most societies, there is such a conventional procedure called marriage and it has certain conventional effects. For a marriage to happen, there has to be a minimal number of people present, such as a priest or registrar, the two future spouses, witnesses, etc., and the procedure must be carried out in a certain place. Only saying I will or I do will be acceptable in English speaking countries, and not Yes, or I will not; the married couple must sign their names in a register, etc. If these conditions are not met, we might say that the procedure has misfired. One can, nevertheless, be married against ones will, or even when ones thoughts and intentions are insincere, if one goes through the procedure correctly and completely. We might, however, say in such cases that the procedure has been abused and, according to one view, at least, marriages under duress are not legally binding. What is essential to note is the fundamental importance of collectively recognized conventions and institutional factors for such performative acts to take effect. Performativity (of the sort discussed in this example, at least) seems to be a matter of what the words mean and the powers accorded to people by virtue of certain social institutions. Or, in other words, words can do things when they felicitously invoke a convention (Petrey 19xx). Already, however, by the end of the lectures which make up How to Do Things with Words, Austin began to challenge his original distinction between constatives (as truth-bearers) and performatives (as action-performers). For one this, it would seem that the distinction between truth-conditions and felicity-conditions is not as hard-and-fast as it originally seemed to b. Is the insincerity of a promise really so different from the insincerity of an assertion? For a performative to be effective, isnt in necessary for certain things to be true? And can the truth or falsehood of statement always be evaluated in clear-cut terms? Dont we often make statements that are roughly speaking true, but strictly speaking false, but which are nevertheless appropriately (felicitously) used in those contexts in which a certain degree of approximation does not matter? More significantly still, even constatives (The cat is on the mat) produce something: an assertion, a statement. The cat is on the mat is therefore more or less equivalent to I state/ assert/ suggest/ hypothesize/ admit that the cat is on the mat, and we can say that these utterances are neither true nor false but perform the act of asserting, suggesting, admitting or hypothesizing that the cat is on the mat. If the example seems unconvincing, think of the way in which truly new realities are instated by scientific assertions (constatives, according to the above distinctions) about black holes, quarks, strings, neutrinos, bosons, etc. Do such scientific statements describe reality? 2

Perhaps, as proponents of these theories hope. What they certainly do is create a reality in which we think of the world in these terms, a reality in which the very notion that we might actually be able check whether such statements correspond to the way the world really is becomes really problematic. A world in which statements about theoretical entities might very well be true, without however us having the possibility to know or conclusively prove that they are so. This, from the original distinction between performatives and constatives, Austin moved towards a distinction between three dimensions of a speech act: the locutionary act, the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary aspect. In performing a speech act ( I promise to help you with your essay), a speaker is simultaneously performing (a) a locutionary act (LA): the act of uttering a sentence with a sense and reference; (b) an illocutionary act (IA, performed in saying something): the act of doing something; this is what the utterance counts as in the speakers plan of action, the force or intention behind the words, i.e. a promise; (c) a perlocutionary act (PA, perfomed by saying something): the (intended or unintended) effect the utterance has on the hearer, i.e. in this case, the hearer will probably be reassured and comforted by the speakers promise. The IA must involve intentions (the speaker intends his utterance to count as a promise) but what is intended by speakers is not always understood by hearers: someone might, for instance, take offence when no offence was intended, or may fail to understand criticism, irony, reproach, even when they were clearly intended by the speaker. For a speech act to be successfully performed, there must be what Austin calls securing of the uptake, i.e. illocutionary intentions must be recognized (by the hearer) as they were intended (by the speaker). There are primary or implicit performatives ( Be quiet!) and explicit performatives (I order you to be quiet!). In the latter case, the presence of a performative verb indicates clearly what speech act is performed. Besides performative verbs ( warn, order, advise, promise, apologize, declare, thank, inform, suggest, congratulate, etc.), there are many other illocutionary force indicators (IFIDs), i.e. linguistic means of indicating what the speech act in question counts as. Modal verbs (must, may) indicate interdiction, obligation, or the granting of permission. Grammatical mood (e.g., the imperative) can indicate an order or command ( Shut it now!). Intonation can indicate a question, a warning, an order, and so on. The precise illocutionary force of an utterance can only be specified in the context of utterance. The illocutionary force of an utterance is a pragmatic aspect of meaning and is not fully determined by the linguistic meaning of that utterance. The concept of felicity conditions was later on developed by Searle in his theory of the constitutive rules (or conditions) that make up a speech acts (the rules are constitutive, like the rules of the game of chess, and not merely regulative, as traffic rules are, in the sense that they do not regulate some pre-existing and logically independent behaviour: there is no doing things with words that is independent of performing speech acts). According to Searle (1969: 41), speaking a language is engaging in a rule-governed form of behaviour. These underlying rules are constitutive in the sense explained above and are placed at a more fundamental level than the rules or conventions of any particular language. Different human languages, to the extent they are inter-translatable, can be regarded as different conventional realizations of the same underlying rules. The fact that in French one can make a promise by saying je promets and in English one can make it by saying I promise is a matter of convention. But the fact that an utterance of a promising device (under appropriate conditions) counts as the undertaking of an obligation is a matter of [constitutive, underlying, semantic] rules and not a matter of the conventions of French or English (Searle 1969: 39-40). Searle illustrates the concept of constitutive rule by means of the speech act of promising but the same analysis carries over into other types of speech acts, as will be shown later. Being able to successfully and non-defectively

perform an act of promising amounts to (tacitly) drawing promissory IFID of the type promise, abbreviated as Pr):

on the following rules (for any

Propositional content rule: Pr is to be uttered only in the context of a sentence which predicates some future act A of the speaker S. Preparatory conditions: (a) Pr is to be uttered only if the hearer H would prefer Ss doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer Ss doing A to his not doing A. (b) Pr is to be uttered only if it is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events. Sincerity rule: Pr is to be uttered only if S intends to do A. Essential rule: The utterance of Pr counts as the undertaking of an obligation to do A. (Searle 1969: 63) Rules of this type (to be further illustrated later) only do justice to the most prototypical examples of the speech act types in question. For instance, a promise is still a promise even if the Hearer does not in fact prefer that the Speaker should perform the act and the Speaker may be unaware of this. Sometimes, promise is used in place of other verbs: I promise to fail you if you cheat, a threat and not a promise, in spite of the wording. Searle has also put forward a classification of speech acts into five classes: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. Each is correlated with a particular psychological (intentional) state (specified in the acts sincerity condition) and a particular direction of fit between language and the world. Each has a particular illocutionary point or function (expressed in the essential condition). Representatives (assertives) (illustrated by assertions, hypotheses, descriptions, conclusions, etc.) are those speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. The point of an assertion is to commit the Speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition. (There are various degree of commitment, from a mere guess or suggestion to certain knowledge). The direction of fit is words to world (i.e. the speaker is trying to make his words correspond to, or represent the world). The expressed psychological state is belief. Examples of characteristic verbs: affirm, assert, claim, declare, report, predict, describe, suggest, guess, assume, suppose, advise, announce, agree, reject, etc. Directives (e.g. orders, requests, commands, suggestions, advice, questions, seen as requests for information) are those speech acts that speakers use in order to make someone else do something (this is their point or function). In using a directive, a speaker attempts to make the world fit the words, via the hearer. In terms of psychological state, they express what the speaker wants (his desires, wishes). Questions are a sub-class of directives, as requests for information. Examples of characteristic verbs: ask, implore, order, command, request, forbid, prohibit, grant, consent warn, advise, caution, recommend, inquire, interrogate, etc. Commissives (e.g. promises, threats) are those speech acts whereby speakers commit themselves to a future course of action (this is their illocutionary point). They express the speakers intentions, and they attempt to make the world fit the words (change the world in accordance with what the speaker has promised). Examples of characteristic verbs: promise, swear, vow, pledge, offer, volunteer. Expressives (Congratulations! Im sorry!) are those speech acts whose point is to state what the speaker feels (actually, they express the psychological state specified in the sincerity condition). They express various psychological states (pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes) and have no direction of fit with the external world but only between words and the speakers internal states (the words should fit the speakers inner world). Examples of characteristic verbs: apologize, 4

thank, congratulate, greet, regret, etc. Expressives (or acknowledgments) often involve stereotypical formulas: Good morning, Sorry, Happy birthday, Damn, Ouch, Hurray, Thank you, Best wishes, Youre welcome, etc. in which the propositional content is not overly expressed. Finally, declarations are those speech acts that create new state of affairs, or change the word, in being uttered. They include many of Austins original performative class, i.e. utterances like I pronounce you husband and wife, I name this ship The Queen Mary, I sentence you to life imprisonment, I declare war, Youre fired, etc., when uttered in the right circumstances by the right persons. Unlike the other four types of speech acts, declarations rely heavily on extralinguistic conventions and have no sincerity condition (no expressed psychological state). The direction of fit is both words to world and world to words: the successful performance of the act guarantees that the propositional content corresponds to the new state of affairs that is created by means of the words. There are direct speech acts and indirect speech acts. In the latter case, e.g., Can you tell me the time?), an indirect request (the intended, primary illocutionary force of the utterance in this case) is performed by means of a direct question. Clearly, for most hearers, the act is not a question but a request for information. It would surprise and annoy the speaker if he were to receive Yes, No or Perhaps as an answer without any further information. In fact, people seem to be most competent when it comes to understanding or making use of indirectness in language. How does that come to pass? How are hearers able to understand the indirect (nonliterl) act on the basis of the direct (literal) one? More about indirect speech acts will be said in the next chapter.

EXERCISES 1. Define and illustrate the concepts of performative vs. constative utterance, as originally distinguished by Austin. 2. Define felicity conditions. What are the felicity conditions for the following utterances to function? 1 I pronounce you man and wife. 2 I sentence you to life-imprisonment. 3 I name this ship Aurora. 3. Comment on the following passage: Once I have uttered the words I apologize no one can deny that I did apologize (even though you may suspect that my apology is insincere). But what if I sneak up on the cruise ship The Queen Elizabeth II at the dead of night as it lies in dry dock and, in a fit of republican passion, smash a bottle of Guinness against the hull and rename it The Albatross? Must it be henceforward be known to everyone as The Albatross? (Thomas 195:33) 4.Cross-cultural differences in the use of performatives. The following events were said to occur in Pakistan. Could they have occurred in the UK or Romania? Why? A terrible tangle has arisen in Pakistan over a local soap opera. Soap star Usman Pirzada divorced his television wife in traditional Muslim style, pronouncing Talaq I divorce thee three times. The trouble was that his TV spouse was played by his real wife Samina. Now the ulemas are saying that the divorce is binding, even though the formula was spoken in the interests of art. 5

Their decree maintains that the Prophet ordained that in three matters (marriage, divorce and the freeing of slaves) words uttered unintentionally or even in jest cannot be withdrawn. Divorced they are and divorced they must remain. (Thomas 1995:43) 5. Comment on the following text (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) in terms of the concepts of implicit/ explicit performative and felicity conditions: King Arthur (Graham Chapman) is travelling across Britain looking for brave knights who might join him in his court at Camelot. Instead he meets two old women (Michael Palin and Terry Jones, dressed up as women) who turn out to be anarcho-syndicalist peasants: [Peasants are excited about some nice mud they are digging up] Arthur: Be quiet! [Peasants continue talking] Arthur: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet! Peasant: Order eh? Who does he think he is? Arthur: I am your King. Peasant: Well, I didnt vote for you. Arthur: You dont vote for kings. Peasant: Well how did you become King then? Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. Peasant: Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. 6. Show that the following sentences can be used both as performative and constative utterances in different contexts or with the verb indicating different temporal values: 1 The jury have found the defendant not guilty. 2 I promise to come. 3 I declare the session open. 7. Define the following concepts: locutionary act (LA), illocutionary act (IA), perlocutionary act (PA). What illocutionary act may be performed in uttering the following sentences? (1) Would you like a cup of coffee? (2) After you (said to someone wishing to go through the same door as the speaker). (3) Im awfully sorry I wasnt at the meeting this morning. (4) You can play outside for half an hour. (5) Good evening. (6) I think the weather is going to improve. (7) I am very grateful for everything you have done for me. (8) I dont take sugar in my coffee, thank you.(9) Why dont you try looking in Woolworths? (10) Do you think Im an idiot? 8. What perlocutionary acts may be performed by uttering the following sentences? (1) To a friend: There is a spider on your collar. (2) Neighbour to recently bereaved widow: I was so sorry to hear about your loss. (3) Lecturer to student: Youll find the book on clitics in Romance language quite fascinating. (4) Policeman to man carrying a brick: Good evening, Sir. Do you live around here? (5) I think you are rather stupid. (6) There, there, everything is going to be 6

just fine. (7) Fire! (8) Sorry to interrupt.../Excuse me.../Err... (9) To a friend: I like your hair. (10) Lock the door well tonight, there are all sorts of dubious individuals lurking around. 9. Do the following sentences report illocutions or perlocutions? Which words report illocutionary acts and which words report perlocutionary acts? Translate these sentences into Romanian. I asked him to go there. I coaxed him into going there. By objecting to her criticism, Abel amused Mabel. Abel suggested to Mabel that she leave and thereby offended her. By promising to help her I managed to relieve her worries. She was flattered and charmed by his words, especially when he told her she didnt look a day over 25. He suggested that we should give up trying, which left us in a state of bewilderment and confusion. The conclusions were very frustrating. They can be brainwashed into believing anything. Some people were disheartened at the news, others were inspired with courage. What is past help should be past grief, she said soothingly. Were sick and tired of all this browbeating and bullying, they said. Instead of convincing them, all youve managed to do is annoy them and turn them against us. We frightened the geese away. Someone cried for help. His words boosted the mens morale. ? By saying I promise to do it, I was trying to reassure/ comfort/ encourage her. He reproached her bitterly and this only annoyed her/ amused her/ irritated her/ upset her/ demoralized her. I was astonished/ stunned/ staggered/ dumbstruck/ scared by/at his suggestion. His flattering remarks seduced/ coaxed/ cajoled/ enticed/ tempted/ manipulated/ charmed/ bullied her into doing something she would have never done otherwise. 10. Identify and discuss illocutionary force indicators (IFIDs) in the examples below: Oh, come off it! Stop this ridiculous nonsense at once! You are hereby requested to leave the premises at once. Thank you so much for your help. Hes at home. Hes at home? Im afraid you must give up smoking. You cannot smoke here, Im afraid, smoking in pubs is no longer permitted in England. You really should get down to work. I am pleased to hereby offer you the job. I regret to inform you that the job is no longer available. I must ask you to leave. I can promise you that no stone will be left unturned. Apparently, the butler did it. Obviously, the butler did it. Undoubtedly, these rumours are not true. Possibly, these rumours are not true. The traffic is very heavy, I warn you. Its going to be all right, I promise.

TEXTS FOR ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION (An analysis of the following text and possibly one or two similar ones, accompanied by a theoretical discussion of speech acts, could be turned into a very nice BA dissertation!!) 1. Discuss the speech act type involved in the following text. First, look at the main illocutionary force indicators (IFIDs). Then, try to determine whether the speech acts involved are related to advice, commands, instructions, recommendations, etc. and decide how you would classify them in terms of Searles taxonomy of speech acts. Finally, try to write up a set of rules (felicity conditions) for the main type of speech act involved. From: Umberto Eco (1992) How to Organize a Public Library, in How to Travel with a Salmon & other essays. 1. The various catalogues must be housed as far apart as possible from one another. All care must be taken to separate the catalogue of books from that or periodicals, and these two from the 7

catalogue by subject; similarly, the recent acquisitions must be kept well away from older collections () 3. Call numbers should be impossible to decipher and, if possible, very complex, so that anyone filling out a call slip will never have room to include the last line of numbers and will assume they are irrelevant. Then the desk attendant will hand the slip back to him with the admonition to fill it out properly. 4. The time between request and delivery must be as long as possible. 5. Only one book should be released at a time. () 7. Insofar as possible, no photocopier should be available; if such a machine does exist, access to it must be made very time-consuming and toilsome, fees should be higher than those in the neighborhood copy shop, and the maximum number of copied pages permitted should not exceed two or three. 8. The librarian must consider the reader an enemy, a waster of time (otherwise he or she would be at work), and a potential thief. () 11. Interlibrary loans must be impossible or, at best, must require months. The ideal course, in any event, is to ensure the impossibility of discovering the contents of other libraries. () 13. Opening hours must coincide precisely with local office hours, determined by foresighted discussions with trade union officials and the Chamber of Commerce; total closing on Saturday, Sunday, evenings and mealtimes goes without saying. The librarys worst enemy is the employed student; its best friend is Thomas Jefferson, someone who has a large personal library (to which he may nevertheless bequeath his books at his death). 14. It must be impossible to find any refreshment inside the library, under any circumstances; and it must also be impossible to leave the library to seek sustenance elsewhere without first returning all books in use, so that, after having a cup of coffee, the student must fill out request for them again. 15. It must be impossible on a given day to find the book one had been using the day before. () 18. Ideally, the reader should be unable to enter the library. If he does actually enter, exploiting with tedious insistence a right, granted on the basis of the principles of 1789, that has nevertheless not been assimilated by the collective sensibility, he must never ever with the exception of rapid visits to the reference shelves be allowed access to the sanctum of the stacks. CONFIDENTIAL NOTE: All staff must be affected by physical defects, as it is the duty of a public institution to offer job opportunities to handicapped citizens (the Fire Department is considering an extension of this rule to their ranks). In particular, the ideal librarian should limp, in order to lengthen the time devoted to receiving the call slip, descending into the basement and returning. For personnel expected to use ladders to reach shelves more than eight meters above the ground, it is required that missing arms be replaced by prosthetic hooks, for security reasons. Personnel lacking both upper limbs will deliver the requested

volume by gripping it in their teeth (library regulations tend to prevent the delivery of volumes in a format larger than octavo).