Channels, Fall 2018

Page 18 Yost • Speech Act of Naming Speech Acts The main premise of any theory of speech acts is that humans are able to use words in ways that go beyond their simple linguistic content. This is an idea mainly originating with Austin (1975) and continually developed by Searle (1999) and others, more recently by Alston (2000). Speech acts, as pointed out by Cruse (2011), dwell in both semantic and pragmatic study, though he groups them with other pragmatic topics as is conventional. While Korta and Perry’s brief address of speech acts is from a more pragmatic angle (2011), Alston takes them in a more semantic direction by looking ultimately at meaning. The term speech act is used mostly as a topical term covering three specific kinds of acts: locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts (Cruse, 2011). At the base, a locutionary act is simply an utterance. Cruse includes that it has a “certain sense and certain reference” (p. 363). Alston (2000) calls this level a sentential act, focusing mainly on the utterance itself. A perlocutionary act looks to the result of an utterance, either the completed performance of an act (Cruse) or the effect on an audience (Alston). Occurring somewhere in between, an illocutionary act is much more difficult to clearly define, though people often include the idea of the speaker’s intention. Cruse and Alston both acknowledge that an illocutionary act is an utterance containing a particular action. Alston, however, spends a solid portion of his book laying out exactly how that works, which I will touch on later. In demonstrating the connection between the three kinds of acts, Wolterstorff (1995) writes, “Illocutionary acts are related to locutionary acts by way of the counting as relation; perlocutionary acts are related to illocutionary acts by causality” (p. 33). Although Alston uses different language and recognizes periodic exceptions, he would likely agree. In a discussion of speech acts, one is likely to hear the term “performative verb.” These kinds of verbs “function specifically to encode illocutionary force” (Cruse, 2011, p. 365), with illocutionary force being the “act aimed at by producing an utterance” (p. 365). While these explicit verbs are useful for identifying speech acts, they are not needed for a successful act and are actually quite limited in their usability. This connects also to the performative hypothesis, which asserts, “There are certain types of utterance whose properties seem to suggest that even implicit performatives have a ‘hidden’ or underlying explicit performative verb” (Cruse, 2011, p. 373). In other words, one could reimagine the sentence with the same general content and force with an added explicit performative verb. Cruse gives the following formula with everything in italics as optional: I (hereby) Vp you (that) S. Though this hypothesis may not be as accepted as others, Alston (2000) appears to agree at least with the basic idea. Generally, illocutionary acts are divided further into five categories, though terminology occasionally differs. Here, they are listed with examples from Cruse (2011) and Arcadi (2013): 1. assertives : stating, asserting, reporting, acknowledging 2. directives : ordering, requesting, suggesting, commanding 3. commissives : promising, betting, threatening, vowing 4. expressives : thanking, forgiving, congratulating, praising