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The notion 'speech act' is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. There are several different conceptions of what exactly "speech acts" are.
Following the usage of, for example, P. F. Strawson and John R. Searle, "speech act" is often meant to refer just to the same thing as the term illocutionary act, which John L. Austin had originally introduced in ''How to Do Things with Words'' (published posthumously in 1962).
According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea of an "illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasising that "by saying something, we ''do'' something", as when a minister joins two people in marriage saying, "I now pronounce you husband and wife." (Austin would eventually define the "illocutionary act" in a more exact manner.)
★ Greeting (in saying, "Hi John!", for instance), apologizing ("Sorry for that!"), describing something ("It is snowing"), asking a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request and giving an order ("Could you pass the salt?" and "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back") are typical examples of "speech acts" or "illocutionary acts".
★ In saying, "Watch out, the ground is slippery", Peter performs the speech act of warning Mary to be careful.
★ In saying, "I will try my best to be at home for dinner", Peter performs the speech act of promising to be at home in time.
★ In saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?", Peter requests the audience to be quiet.
★ In saying, "Can you race with me to that building over there?", Peter challenges Mary.
For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. The work of J. L. Austin, particularly his ''How to Do Things with Words'', led philosophers to pay more attention to the non-declarative uses of language. The terminology he introduced, especially the notions "locutionary act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionary act", occupied an important role in what was then to become the "study of speech acts". All of these three acts, but especially the "illocutionary act", are nowadays commonly classified as "speech acts".
Austin was by no means the first one to deal with what one could call "speech acts" in a wider sense. Earlier treatments may be found in the works of some church fathers and scholastic philosophers, in the context of sacramental theology, as well as Thomas Reid[1], and C. S. Peirce[2].
Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) has been credited with a fairly comprehensive account of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long before Austin and Searle. His work had little influence, however, perhaps due to his untimely death at 33 (having immediately enlisted in the German Army at the onset of war in 1914).
The term "Speech Act" had also been already used by Karl Bühler in his "Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften”, ''Kant-Studien'' 38 (1933), 43, where he discusses a ''Theorie der Sprechhandlungen'' and in his book ''Sprachtheorie'' (Jena: Fischer, 1934) where he uses "''Sprechhandlung''" and "''Theorie der Sprechakte''".
Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that performed in the utterance of what Austin calls performatives, typical instances of which are "I nominate John to be President", "I sentence you to ten years' imprisonment", or "I promise to pay you back."
In these typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself.
The study of speech acts forms part of pragmatics, an area of linguistics.
In philosophy, especially in ethics and philosophy of law, speech-act theory is often treated as related to the study of norms.
In the course of performancing speech acts we ordinarily communicate with each other. The content of communication may be identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be communicated, as when I request Peter to wash the dishes by saying, "Peter, could you please do the dishes?"
However, the meaning of the linguistic means used (if ever there are linguistic means, for at least some so-called "speech acts" can be performed non-verbally) may also be different from the content intended to be communicated. I may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter ...!", or I can promise to do the dishes by saying, "Me!" One common way of performing speech acts is to use an expression which indicates one speech act, and indeed to perform this act, but additionally to perform a further speech act, which is not indicated by the expression uttered. I may, for instance, request Peter to open the window by saying, "Peter, will you be able to reach the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he will be able to reach the window, but at the same time I am requesting him to do so if he can. Since the request is performed indirectly, by means of (directly) performing a question, it counts as an indirect speech act.
Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example, a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and another replies, "I have class." The second speaker used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection.
This poses a problem for linguists because it is confusing (on a rather simple approach) to see how the person who made the proposal can understand that his proposal was rejected. Following substantially an account of H. P. Grice, Searle suggests that we are able to derive meaning out of indirect speech acts by means of a cooperative process out of which we are able to derive multiple illocutions; however, the process he proposes does not seem to accurately solve the problem. Sociolinguistics has studied the social dimensions of conversations. This discipline considers the various contexts in which speech acts occur.
The concept of an illocutionary act is central to Searle's understanding of speech acts. An illocutionary act is the ''expression'' of a proposition with the purpose of ''doing'' something else. This is a bit more complex than a simple locutionary act (such as "It is raining") because an illocutionary force is attached to the utterance that indicates how the expression should be taken. Examples of illocutionary acts are "I will return this book to you next week" and "Please hand me that pencil." In the first example the illocutionary act has the force of a promise to return a book. The second example is an illocutionary act having the force of a request in which the speaker is soliciting a reaction.
In most instances of language, the speaker's meaning and the literal meaning of an utterance are identical. For example, if a speaker says, "I will return this book to you next week" or "When will you need this book returned?", the speaker's intention and the literal meaning are the same. In either example, a third person that should happen to overhear this portion of a conversation and has no prior experience in the conversation would be able to understand the correct meaning of the utterances. However, there are cases in which the speaker’s meaning of an utterance is different from its literal meaning. Consider this situation:
Speaker (S) asks hearer (H), "Would you mind turning down the volume on your radio?", and H responds by lowering the volume.
Both S and H spoke and behaved in a way that we would expect: S performed the perlocutionary act of getting H to turn down the volume. However, this case is problematic for linguists because the speaker's meaning differs from the literal meaning. The literal meaning of the question is that S is soliciting a verbal response of "yes" or "no" from H (perhaps followed by an explanation). However, S intended H to understand the question as a command to turn down the volume, and H understood the question as S intended it. This exchange, while not uncommon, is troubling because one questions how it is possible (1) for a speaker to say something and mean something different from the meaning of the utterance, and (2) for a hearer to understand both meanings. Utterances of this nature are troubling for linguists, and the problems caused by such statements are the concern of Searle in his article "Indirect Speech Acts". Further examples of indirect speech acts include the following:
★ "Can you hand me that pencil?"
★ "I hope you will arrive on time."
★ "Would you remove your hat?"
★ "Do you want me to drop that off for you?"
★ "It might help if you turn on the lights."
★ "I might ask you to observe silence in the library."
Although many indirect speech acts are softened or polite commands, indirect speech acts can also include apologies, assertions, congratulations, promises, and thanks.
Searle proposes a set of structural rules that generalize the steps that take place during indirect speech acts. His proposition is, "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer." Searle's solution will require an analysis of mutually shared background information about the conversation that will be pieced together with a theory of speech acts and linguistic convention.
Searle begins by making a distinction between primary and secondary illocutionary acts. A primary illocutionary act is not literal; rather, it is what the speaker means to communicate. The secondary illocutionary act is the literal meaning of the utterance (Searle 178). In the example:
:(1) Speaker X: "We should leave for the show or else we’ll be late."
:(2) Speaker Y: "I am not ready yet."
The primary illocutionary act is Y's rejection of X's suggestion, and the secondary illocutionary act is Y's statement that she is not ready to leave. By dividing the illocutionary act into two subparts, Searle is able to explain how we can understand two meanings from the same utterance all the while knowing which is the correct meaning to respond to.
Searle attempts to explain how we are to separate the primary illocution from the secondary illocution by means of a set of steps that the speaker and hearer must subconsciously complete. For the previous example a condensed process would look like this:
:Step 1: A proposal is made by X, and Y responded by means of an illocutionary act (2).
:Step 2: X assumes that Y is cooperating in the conversation, being sincere, and that she has made a statement that is relevant.
:Step 3: The literal meaning of (2) is not relevant to the conversation.
:Step 4: Since X assumes that Y is cooperating; there must be another meaning to (2).
:Step 5: Based on mutually shared background information, X knows that they cannot leave until Y is ready. Therefore, Y has rejected X's proposition.
:Step 6: X knows that Y has said something in something other than the literal meaning, and the primary illocutionary act must have been the rejection of X's proposal.
Searle argues that a similar process can be applied to any indirect speech act as a model to find the primary illocutionary act (178). His proof for this argument is made by means of a series of observations that he takes to be facts.
:Observation 1: Indirect speech acts should not be confused with imperatives.
:Observation 2: Indirect speech acts "are not ambiguous as between an imperative illocutionary force and a nonimperative illocutionary force" (180).
:Observation 3: Indirect speech acts are usually used as directives.
:Observation 4: Indirect speech acts are not idioms of a particular language, since they can be translated without losing their original meaning.
:Observation 5: Indirect speech acts are idiomatic because a paraphrase may not produce the same primary illocution.
:Observation 6: Indirect speech acts have a secondary illocution that have meaning when taken literally but do not have any sort of indirect meaning.
:Observation 7: When a request is made using an indirect speech act whose literal meaning is also a request, the speaker adds meaning so that he may respond appropriately.
:Observation 8: When a request is made using an indirect speech act whose literal meaning is also a request, the speaker responds to both the primary and secondary illocution by virtue of responding to the primary illocution (Searle 180–182).
The last two observations (7 and 8) seem not to be indirect speech acts because both illocutions are requests; however, while they are both requests they may still have different meanings. Consider the example of a telephone call:
:(3) Speaker P: "Is Tom there?"
Possible appropriate responses include:
:(4) Speaker Q: "No, he’s not here right now."
:(5) Speaker Q: "Yes, I’ll hand him the phone."
Observation 7 notes that there are two possible ways in which the speaker can respond while fulfilling the requirements laid out in Searle's process (cooperation, relevance, sincerity, etc.). The question in (3) can be taken either as a question about Tom’s location or as a request to speak with Tom. Observation 8 notes that in responding to (3) by handing Tom the phone, Q has answered the primary illocution (P's request to speak with Tom) and at the same time has answered the secondary illocution (as to Tom's location).
Searle has shown that his series of steps form a framework by which we can understand requests; however, he has yet to show that this process will work to help us point to the meaning of other indirect speech acts. To use this process on other indirect speech acts, he will have to prove that there are two illocutionary forces for each utterance, one (the primary force) that is the speaker's intent, and another one (the secondary force) that is the literal meaning of the utterance. He will also have to propose a system by which we can differentiate the two illocutionary forces. Searle offers the following process for doing this:
:Step 1: Understand the facts of the conversation.
:Step 2: Assume cooperation and relevance on behalf of the participants.
:Step 3: Establish factual background information pertinent to the conversation.
:Step 4: Make assumptions about the conversation based on steps 1–3.
:Step 5: If steps 1–4 do not yield a consequential meaning, then infer that there are two illocutionary forces at work.
:Step 6: Assume the hearer has the ability to perform the act the speaker suggests. The act that the speaker is asking be performed must be something that would make sense for one to ask. For example, the hearer might have the ability to pass the salt when asked to do so by a speaker who is at the same table, but not have the ability to pass the salt to a speaker who is asking the hearer to pass the salt during a telephone conversation.
:Step 7: Make inferences from steps 1–6 regarding possible primary illocutions.
:Step 8: Use background information to establish the primary illocution (Searle 184).
With this process, Searle concludes that he has found a method that will satisfactorily produce two illocutionary forces that explain how we can act upon indirect speech acts.
Searle (1975)[3] has set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts:
★ 'assertives' = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition
★ 'directives' = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice
★ 'commissives' = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths
★ 'expressives' = speech acts that expresses on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks
★ 'declaratives' = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife
Dore (1975) stated that children's utterances were realizations of one of nine primitive speech acts:
#labelling
#repeating
#answering
#requesting (action)
#requesting (answer)
#calling
#greeting
#protesting
#practicing
Speech act theory has been influential in computer science since the early 1980s, particularly in the design of artificial languages for communication between software entities ("agents" or "softbots"). The theory was used, for example, to give a semantics to Agent Communication Language (ACL), an agent language developed by the standards body Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). This semantics built on the work of Phil Cohen, Hector Levesque and David Sadek, among others. The FIPA ACL speech act semantics, expressed semi-formally using epistemic modal logic, defines utterances in ACL in terms of the certain beliefs, uncertain beliefs, desires and intentions of the speaker. In principle, therefore, it enables agents using FIPA ACL to be sure that other agents will understand the meaning of utterances in the same way as the speaker. However, the FIPA ACL language syntax and semantics, although now widely used in agent systems, have been heavily criticized on theoretical and practical grounds.
Another highly-influential view of Speech Acts has been in the 'Conversation for Action' developed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in their 1987 text "Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design". Arguably the most important part of their analysis lies in a state-transition diagram (in Chapter 5) that Winograd and Flores claim underlies the significant illocutionary (speech act) claims of two parties attempting to coordinate action with one another (no matter whether the agents involved might be human-human, human-computer, or computer-computer).
A key part of this analysis is the contention that one dimension of the social domain- tracking the illocutionary status of the transaction (whether individual participants 'claim' that their interests have been met, or not) is very readily conferred to a computer process- independent of whether the computer has the means to adequately represent the real world issues underlying that claim. Thus a computer instantiating the 'conversation for action' has the useful ability to model the status of the current social reality independent of any external reality on which social claims may be based.
This transactional view of speech acts has significant applications in many areas in which (human) individuals have had different roles- for instance- a patient and a physician might meet in an encounter in which the patient makes a request for treatment, the physician responds with a counter-offer involving a treatment she feels is appropriate, and the patient might respond, etc. Such a "Conversation for Action" can describe a situation in which an external observer (such as a computer or health information system) may be able to track the ILLOCUTIONARY (or Speech Act) STATUS of negotiations between the patient and physician participants even in the absence of any adequate model of the illness or propoposed treatments. The key insight provided by Winograd and Flores is that the state-transition diagram representing the SOCIAL (Illocutionary) negotiation of the two parties involved is generally much, much simpler than any model representing the world in which those parties are making claims- in short- the system tracking the status of the 'conversation for action' need not be concerned with modeling all of the realities of the external world- a conversation for action is critically dependent upon certain sterotypical CLAIMS about the status of the world made by the two parties. Thus a "Conversation for Action" can be readily tracked and facilitated by a device with little or no ability to model circumstances in the real world other than the ability to register claims by specific agents about a domain.
In making useful applications of technology to domains such as healthcare, it is helpful to discriminate between problems which are very, very hard (such as deep understanding of pathophysiology as it relates to genetic and various environmental influences) and problem which are relatively easier, such as following the status of negotiations between a patient and a health care provider. Speech Act (Illocutionary) Analysis allows for a useful understanding of the status of a negotiation between (for instance) a health care provider and a patient INDEPENDENT of any well-accepted credible and comprehensive understanding of a disease process as it might apply to that patient. For this reason, systems which track the status of PROMISES and REJECTED-PROPOSALS and ACCEPTED-PROMISES can help us to understand the situations in whih (human or computer) AGENTS find themselves as they attempt to fulfill ROLES involving other agents, and such systems can facilitate both human and human-computer systems in achieving role-associated goals.
1. :"The term ‘social act’ and some of the theory of this ''sui generis'' type of linguistic action are to be found in the fifth of Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a Contract)."
::"''A man may see, and hear, and remember, and judge, and reason; he may deliberate and form purposes, and execute them, without the intervention of any other intelligent being. They are solitary acts. But when he asks a question for information, when he testifies a fact, when he gives a command to his servant, when he makes a promise, or enters into a contract, these are social acts of mind, and can have no existence without the interventionof some other intelligent being, who acts a part in them. Between the operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper name, I have called solitary, and those I have called social, there is this very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression of them by words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They may exist, and be complete, without being expressed, without being known to any other person. But, in the social operations, the expression is essential. They cannot exist without being expressed by words or signs, and known to the other party.''"
:(Reid 1969, 437-438)
:From Mulligan, K. ''Promisings and other social acts - their constituents and structure.'' in Mulligan, K., editor ''Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology''. Nijhoff, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster 1987.
Also see: Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith "Elements of Speech Act Theory in the Work of Thomas Reid" in ''History of Philosophy Quarterly'', 7 (1990), 47–66.
2. Cf. Jarrett Brock “An Introduction to Peirce’s Theory of Speech Acts” in ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'', 17 (1981), 319-326.
3. Searle, John R. (1975), “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”, in: Günderson, K. (ed.), ''Language, Mind, and Knowledge'', Minneapolis, vol. 7
; Indirect speech acts
★ Implicature
★ Metaphor
★ Analogy
★ John Langshaw Austin: ''How to Do Things With Words''. Cambridge (Mass.) 1962 - Paperback: Harvard University Press, 2nd edition, 2005, ISBN 0-674-41152-8.
★ William P. Alston: 'Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning'. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2000, ISBN 0-8014-3669-9.
★ Doerge, Friedrich Christoph. ''Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It''. Tuebingen 2006. [1].
★ John Searle,'' Speech Acts'', Cambridge University Press 1969, ISBN 0-521-09626-X.
★
★
★ John Searle, "Indirect speech acts." In ''Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts'', ed. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, pp. 59–82. New York: Academic Press. (1975). Reprinted in ''Pragmatics: A Reader'', ed. S. Davis, pp. 265–277. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1991)
★ Winograd, T., & Flores, F.: ''Understanding computers and cognition''. Norwood (NJ) 1986 - Ablex
★ ''Speech Acts'' entry from ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', by Kent Bach
★ Barry Smith, ''Towards a History of Speech Act Theory''
★ Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents
★ ''Speech Acts''. Mitchell Green, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
★ Strategies for Learning Speech Acts in Japanese by Noriko Ishihara
Speech act as an illocutionary act
Following the usage of, for example, P. F. Strawson and John R. Searle, "speech act" is often meant to refer just to the same thing as the term illocutionary act, which John L. Austin had originally introduced in ''How to Do Things with Words'' (published posthumously in 1962).
According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea of an "illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasising that "by saying something, we ''do'' something", as when a minister joins two people in marriage saying, "I now pronounce you husband and wife." (Austin would eventually define the "illocutionary act" in a more exact manner.)
Examples
★ Greeting (in saying, "Hi John!", for instance), apologizing ("Sorry for that!"), describing something ("It is snowing"), asking a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request and giving an order ("Could you pass the salt?" and "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back") are typical examples of "speech acts" or "illocutionary acts".
★ In saying, "Watch out, the ground is slippery", Peter performs the speech act of warning Mary to be careful.
★ In saying, "I will try my best to be at home for dinner", Peter performs the speech act of promising to be at home in time.
★ In saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?", Peter requests the audience to be quiet.
★ In saying, "Can you race with me to that building over there?", Peter challenges Mary.
History
For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. The work of J. L. Austin, particularly his ''How to Do Things with Words'', led philosophers to pay more attention to the non-declarative uses of language. The terminology he introduced, especially the notions "locutionary act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionary act", occupied an important role in what was then to become the "study of speech acts". All of these three acts, but especially the "illocutionary act", are nowadays commonly classified as "speech acts".
Austin was by no means the first one to deal with what one could call "speech acts" in a wider sense. Earlier treatments may be found in the works of some church fathers and scholastic philosophers, in the context of sacramental theology, as well as Thomas Reid[1], and C. S. Peirce[2].
Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) has been credited with a fairly comprehensive account of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long before Austin and Searle. His work had little influence, however, perhaps due to his untimely death at 33 (having immediately enlisted in the German Army at the onset of war in 1914).
The term "Speech Act" had also been already used by Karl Bühler in his "Die Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften”, ''Kant-Studien'' 38 (1933), 43, where he discusses a ''Theorie der Sprechhandlungen'' and in his book ''Sprachtheorie'' (Jena: Fischer, 1934) where he uses "''Sprechhandlung''" and "''Theorie der Sprechakte''".
Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that performed in the utterance of what Austin calls performatives, typical instances of which are "I nominate John to be President", "I sentence you to ten years' imprisonment", or "I promise to pay you back."
In these typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself.
The study of speech acts forms part of pragmatics, an area of linguistics.
In philosophy, especially in ethics and philosophy of law, speech-act theory is often treated as related to the study of norms.
Indirect speech acts
In the course of performancing speech acts we ordinarily communicate with each other. The content of communication may be identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be communicated, as when I request Peter to wash the dishes by saying, "Peter, could you please do the dishes?"
However, the meaning of the linguistic means used (if ever there are linguistic means, for at least some so-called "speech acts" can be performed non-verbally) may also be different from the content intended to be communicated. I may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter ...!", or I can promise to do the dishes by saying, "Me!" One common way of performing speech acts is to use an expression which indicates one speech act, and indeed to perform this act, but additionally to perform a further speech act, which is not indicated by the expression uttered. I may, for instance, request Peter to open the window by saying, "Peter, will you be able to reach the window?", thereby asking Peter whether he will be able to reach the window, but at the same time I am requesting him to do so if he can. Since the request is performed indirectly, by means of (directly) performing a question, it counts as an indirect speech act.
Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example, a speaker asks, "Would you like to meet me for coffee?" and another replies, "I have class." The second speaker used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of "I have class" does not entail any sort of rejection.
This poses a problem for linguists because it is confusing (on a rather simple approach) to see how the person who made the proposal can understand that his proposal was rejected. Following substantially an account of H. P. Grice, Searle suggests that we are able to derive meaning out of indirect speech acts by means of a cooperative process out of which we are able to derive multiple illocutions; however, the process he proposes does not seem to accurately solve the problem. Sociolinguistics has studied the social dimensions of conversations. This discipline considers the various contexts in which speech acts occur.
Illocutionary acts
The concept of an illocutionary act is central to Searle's understanding of speech acts. An illocutionary act is the ''expression'' of a proposition with the purpose of ''doing'' something else. This is a bit more complex than a simple locutionary act (such as "It is raining") because an illocutionary force is attached to the utterance that indicates how the expression should be taken. Examples of illocutionary acts are "I will return this book to you next week" and "Please hand me that pencil." In the first example the illocutionary act has the force of a promise to return a book. The second example is an illocutionary act having the force of a request in which the speaker is soliciting a reaction.
In most instances of language, the speaker's meaning and the literal meaning of an utterance are identical. For example, if a speaker says, "I will return this book to you next week" or "When will you need this book returned?", the speaker's intention and the literal meaning are the same. In either example, a third person that should happen to overhear this portion of a conversation and has no prior experience in the conversation would be able to understand the correct meaning of the utterances. However, there are cases in which the speaker’s meaning of an utterance is different from its literal meaning. Consider this situation:
Speaker (S) asks hearer (H), "Would you mind turning down the volume on your radio?", and H responds by lowering the volume.
Both S and H spoke and behaved in a way that we would expect: S performed the perlocutionary act of getting H to turn down the volume. However, this case is problematic for linguists because the speaker's meaning differs from the literal meaning. The literal meaning of the question is that S is soliciting a verbal response of "yes" or "no" from H (perhaps followed by an explanation). However, S intended H to understand the question as a command to turn down the volume, and H understood the question as S intended it. This exchange, while not uncommon, is troubling because one questions how it is possible (1) for a speaker to say something and mean something different from the meaning of the utterance, and (2) for a hearer to understand both meanings. Utterances of this nature are troubling for linguists, and the problems caused by such statements are the concern of Searle in his article "Indirect Speech Acts". Further examples of indirect speech acts include the following:
★ "Can you hand me that pencil?"
★ "I hope you will arrive on time."
★ "Would you remove your hat?"
★ "Do you want me to drop that off for you?"
★ "It might help if you turn on the lights."
★ "I might ask you to observe silence in the library."
Although many indirect speech acts are softened or polite commands, indirect speech acts can also include apologies, assertions, congratulations, promises, and thanks.
John Searle's theory of "indirect speech acts"
Searle proposes a set of structural rules that generalize the steps that take place during indirect speech acts. His proposition is, "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer." Searle's solution will require an analysis of mutually shared background information about the conversation that will be pieced together with a theory of speech acts and linguistic convention.
Searle begins by making a distinction between primary and secondary illocutionary acts. A primary illocutionary act is not literal; rather, it is what the speaker means to communicate. The secondary illocutionary act is the literal meaning of the utterance (Searle 178). In the example:
:(1) Speaker X: "We should leave for the show or else we’ll be late."
:(2) Speaker Y: "I am not ready yet."
The primary illocutionary act is Y's rejection of X's suggestion, and the secondary illocutionary act is Y's statement that she is not ready to leave. By dividing the illocutionary act into two subparts, Searle is able to explain how we can understand two meanings from the same utterance all the while knowing which is the correct meaning to respond to.
Searle attempts to explain how we are to separate the primary illocution from the secondary illocution by means of a set of steps that the speaker and hearer must subconsciously complete. For the previous example a condensed process would look like this:
:Step 1: A proposal is made by X, and Y responded by means of an illocutionary act (2).
:Step 2: X assumes that Y is cooperating in the conversation, being sincere, and that she has made a statement that is relevant.
:Step 3: The literal meaning of (2) is not relevant to the conversation.
:Step 4: Since X assumes that Y is cooperating; there must be another meaning to (2).
:Step 5: Based on mutually shared background information, X knows that they cannot leave until Y is ready. Therefore, Y has rejected X's proposition.
:Step 6: X knows that Y has said something in something other than the literal meaning, and the primary illocutionary act must have been the rejection of X's proposal.
Searle argues that a similar process can be applied to any indirect speech act as a model to find the primary illocutionary act (178). His proof for this argument is made by means of a series of observations that he takes to be facts.
:Observation 1: Indirect speech acts should not be confused with imperatives.
:Observation 2: Indirect speech acts "are not ambiguous as between an imperative illocutionary force and a nonimperative illocutionary force" (180).
:Observation 3: Indirect speech acts are usually used as directives.
:Observation 4: Indirect speech acts are not idioms of a particular language, since they can be translated without losing their original meaning.
:Observation 5: Indirect speech acts are idiomatic because a paraphrase may not produce the same primary illocution.
:Observation 6: Indirect speech acts have a secondary illocution that have meaning when taken literally but do not have any sort of indirect meaning.
:Observation 7: When a request is made using an indirect speech act whose literal meaning is also a request, the speaker adds meaning so that he may respond appropriately.
:Observation 8: When a request is made using an indirect speech act whose literal meaning is also a request, the speaker responds to both the primary and secondary illocution by virtue of responding to the primary illocution (Searle 180–182).
The last two observations (7 and 8) seem not to be indirect speech acts because both illocutions are requests; however, while they are both requests they may still have different meanings. Consider the example of a telephone call:
:(3) Speaker P: "Is Tom there?"
Possible appropriate responses include:
:(4) Speaker Q: "No, he’s not here right now."
:(5) Speaker Q: "Yes, I’ll hand him the phone."
Observation 7 notes that there are two possible ways in which the speaker can respond while fulfilling the requirements laid out in Searle's process (cooperation, relevance, sincerity, etc.). The question in (3) can be taken either as a question about Tom’s location or as a request to speak with Tom. Observation 8 notes that in responding to (3) by handing Tom the phone, Q has answered the primary illocution (P's request to speak with Tom) and at the same time has answered the secondary illocution (as to Tom's location).
Searle has shown that his series of steps form a framework by which we can understand requests; however, he has yet to show that this process will work to help us point to the meaning of other indirect speech acts. To use this process on other indirect speech acts, he will have to prove that there are two illocutionary forces for each utterance, one (the primary force) that is the speaker's intent, and another one (the secondary force) that is the literal meaning of the utterance. He will also have to propose a system by which we can differentiate the two illocutionary forces. Searle offers the following process for doing this:
:Step 1: Understand the facts of the conversation.
:Step 2: Assume cooperation and relevance on behalf of the participants.
:Step 3: Establish factual background information pertinent to the conversation.
:Step 4: Make assumptions about the conversation based on steps 1–3.
:Step 5: If steps 1–4 do not yield a consequential meaning, then infer that there are two illocutionary forces at work.
:Step 6: Assume the hearer has the ability to perform the act the speaker suggests. The act that the speaker is asking be performed must be something that would make sense for one to ask. For example, the hearer might have the ability to pass the salt when asked to do so by a speaker who is at the same table, but not have the ability to pass the salt to a speaker who is asking the hearer to pass the salt during a telephone conversation.
:Step 7: Make inferences from steps 1–6 regarding possible primary illocutions.
:Step 8: Use background information to establish the primary illocution (Searle 184).
With this process, Searle concludes that he has found a method that will satisfactorily produce two illocutionary forces that explain how we can act upon indirect speech acts.
Searle (1975)[3] has set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts:
★ 'assertives' = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition
★ 'directives' = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice
★ 'commissives' = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths
★ 'expressives' = speech acts that expresses on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks
★ 'declaratives' = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife
In language development
Dore (1975) stated that children's utterances were realizations of one of nine primitive speech acts:
#labelling
#repeating
#answering
#requesting (action)
#requesting (answer)
#calling
#greeting
#protesting
#practicing
In computer science
Speech act theory has been influential in computer science since the early 1980s, particularly in the design of artificial languages for communication between software entities ("agents" or "softbots"). The theory was used, for example, to give a semantics to Agent Communication Language (ACL), an agent language developed by the standards body Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). This semantics built on the work of Phil Cohen, Hector Levesque and David Sadek, among others. The FIPA ACL speech act semantics, expressed semi-formally using epistemic modal logic, defines utterances in ACL in terms of the certain beliefs, uncertain beliefs, desires and intentions of the speaker. In principle, therefore, it enables agents using FIPA ACL to be sure that other agents will understand the meaning of utterances in the same way as the speaker. However, the FIPA ACL language syntax and semantics, although now widely used in agent systems, have been heavily criticized on theoretical and practical grounds.
Another highly-influential view of Speech Acts has been in the 'Conversation for Action' developed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in their 1987 text "Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design". Arguably the most important part of their analysis lies in a state-transition diagram (in Chapter 5) that Winograd and Flores claim underlies the significant illocutionary (speech act) claims of two parties attempting to coordinate action with one another (no matter whether the agents involved might be human-human, human-computer, or computer-computer).
A key part of this analysis is the contention that one dimension of the social domain- tracking the illocutionary status of the transaction (whether individual participants 'claim' that their interests have been met, or not) is very readily conferred to a computer process- independent of whether the computer has the means to adequately represent the real world issues underlying that claim. Thus a computer instantiating the 'conversation for action' has the useful ability to model the status of the current social reality independent of any external reality on which social claims may be based.
This transactional view of speech acts has significant applications in many areas in which (human) individuals have had different roles- for instance- a patient and a physician might meet in an encounter in which the patient makes a request for treatment, the physician responds with a counter-offer involving a treatment she feels is appropriate, and the patient might respond, etc. Such a "Conversation for Action" can describe a situation in which an external observer (such as a computer or health information system) may be able to track the ILLOCUTIONARY (or Speech Act) STATUS of negotiations between the patient and physician participants even in the absence of any adequate model of the illness or propoposed treatments. The key insight provided by Winograd and Flores is that the state-transition diagram representing the SOCIAL (Illocutionary) negotiation of the two parties involved is generally much, much simpler than any model representing the world in which those parties are making claims- in short- the system tracking the status of the 'conversation for action' need not be concerned with modeling all of the realities of the external world- a conversation for action is critically dependent upon certain sterotypical CLAIMS about the status of the world made by the two parties. Thus a "Conversation for Action" can be readily tracked and facilitated by a device with little or no ability to model circumstances in the real world other than the ability to register claims by specific agents about a domain.
In making useful applications of technology to domains such as healthcare, it is helpful to discriminate between problems which are very, very hard (such as deep understanding of pathophysiology as it relates to genetic and various environmental influences) and problem which are relatively easier, such as following the status of negotiations between a patient and a health care provider. Speech Act (Illocutionary) Analysis allows for a useful understanding of the status of a negotiation between (for instance) a health care provider and a patient INDEPENDENT of any well-accepted credible and comprehensive understanding of a disease process as it might apply to that patient. For this reason, systems which track the status of PROMISES and REJECTED-PROPOSALS and ACCEPTED-PROMISES can help us to understand the situations in whih (human or computer) AGENTS find themselves as they attempt to fulfill ROLES involving other agents, and such systems can facilitate both human and human-computer systems in achieving role-associated goals.
Notes
1. :"The term ‘social act’ and some of the theory of this ''sui generis'' type of linguistic action are to be found in the fifth of Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a Contract)."
::"''A man may see, and hear, and remember, and judge, and reason; he may deliberate and form purposes, and execute them, without the intervention of any other intelligent being. They are solitary acts. But when he asks a question for information, when he testifies a fact, when he gives a command to his servant, when he makes a promise, or enters into a contract, these are social acts of mind, and can have no existence without the interventionof some other intelligent being, who acts a part in them. Between the operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper name, I have called solitary, and those I have called social, there is this very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression of them by words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They may exist, and be complete, without being expressed, without being known to any other person. But, in the social operations, the expression is essential. They cannot exist without being expressed by words or signs, and known to the other party.''"
:(Reid 1969, 437-438)
:From Mulligan, K. ''Promisings and other social acts - their constituents and structure.'' in Mulligan, K., editor ''Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology''. Nijhoff, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster 1987.
Also see: Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith "Elements of Speech Act Theory in the Work of Thomas Reid" in ''History of Philosophy Quarterly'', 7 (1990), 47–66.
2. Cf. Jarrett Brock “An Introduction to Peirce’s Theory of Speech Acts” in ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'', 17 (1981), 319-326.
3. Searle, John R. (1975), “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”, in: Günderson, K. (ed.), ''Language, Mind, and Knowledge'', Minneapolis, vol. 7
See also
; Indirect speech acts
★ Implicature
★ Metaphor
★ Analogy
Bibliography
★ John Langshaw Austin: ''How to Do Things With Words''. Cambridge (Mass.) 1962 - Paperback: Harvard University Press, 2nd edition, 2005, ISBN 0-674-41152-8.
★ William P. Alston: 'Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning'. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2000, ISBN 0-8014-3669-9.
★ Doerge, Friedrich Christoph. ''Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It''. Tuebingen 2006. [1].
★ John Searle,'' Speech Acts'', Cambridge University Press 1969, ISBN 0-521-09626-X.
★
★
★ John Searle, "Indirect speech acts." In ''Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts'', ed. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, pp. 59–82. New York: Academic Press. (1975). Reprinted in ''Pragmatics: A Reader'', ed. S. Davis, pp. 265–277. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1991)
★ Winograd, T., & Flores, F.: ''Understanding computers and cognition''. Norwood (NJ) 1986 - Ablex
External links
★ ''Speech Acts'' entry from ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', by Kent Bach
★ Barry Smith, ''Towards a History of Speech Act Theory''
★ Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents
★ ''Speech Acts''. Mitchell Green, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
★ Strategies for Learning Speech Acts in Japanese by Noriko Ishihara
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