Lecture title: Speech Acts
Date: Wed. 6th of April, 2011
Course: Linguistics/Pragmatics
Level: 3rd Year Undergraduate Classes
Lecturer: Asst Prof Dr Fareed H. Al-Hindawi
Aim: Familiarizing the students with the basic issues tackled by the speech act theory
Summary
The first version of the speech act theory as introduced by Austin (1962) distinguishes between two types of utterances which grammatically look alike but they differ in their illocutionary forces. The first of which acts as constatives or statements while the second one functions as performatives. The former (e. g. snow is white) describes facts in the world which can be true or false. The latter, however, (e. g. I name this ship Queen Elizabeth) refers to those utterances whose production indicates the performance of an action. Performatives occur to certain felicity conditions and they cannot be true or false.
Then Austin notices that all utterances whether constatives or performatives are in fact kinds of speech acts because they all have saying and doing elements. Thus, a speech act is an act done by means of words. Additionally each speech act can be subdivided into locutionary ( the saying), illocutionary ( the doing), and perlocutionary (the effect) subacts.
Searle (1969), one of Austin s students, develops the original version of the theory by proposing felicity conditions to all speech acts. These conditions are represented by propositional, preparatory, sincerity, and essential rules. He also distinguishes between direct (e. g. I promise to come tomorrow) and indirect (e. g. I ll come tomorrow) speech acts. Besides, he classifies all speech acts into five macro-classes: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations.