Actions speak louder than words, they said, digging more, words are what can make actions speak!
Components:
P1 : Introduction.
P2 : Explaining the Speech Acts Theory.
P3 : Felicity Conditions.
P4 : Types of Speech Acts.
P5 : Searle's Speech Acts Taxonomy.
P6 : Searle's Five Types of Speech acts.
P7 : Direct and Indirect Speech Acts.
P8 : Conclusion.
Bibliography.
Actions speak louder than words, they said, digging more, words are what can make actions speak! The philosophy of language has been developing for years to indeed reveal more and more about language and its functions. This philosophy is what coined the term ''Speech acts''. The term is meant to shed light on cases in which the speech is not used as a statement to be right or wrong. Wittgenstein, a language philosopher, has introduced the current pragmatics speech acts by him stating that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Thereafter, comes Austin(1955) with its interesting lectures at Harvard University, to generate the actual term of speech acts. However, the term was still in its infancy, until Austin's student Searle developed it on various levels. Speech act theory claims that the uttering of a sentence is a performative factor within a social milieu. The statement was supported by various facts.
Speech act theory has updated the old conception of language from a means of stating to a means of performing. The classic view of language was putting it in the frame of statement, in what was labelled as logical positivism. Unlike that, Austin has observed that there are two kinds of speech usage. One which is stative and another that is performative. A constative form of speech is defined as a form in which we assert and state something which could be true or false. On the other hand, the performative form is said to be the use of speech to perform or reinforce actions. The latter form includes two kinds; implicit and explicit. To illustrate the explanation, let's consider the following examples:
A. I do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
B. I promise to take you with me tonight.
C. I will take you with me tonight.
The example ''A'' is an example of an explicit utterance since we need the performative verb '' Declare'' to be in there as a part of the complete oath swearing. ''B'', in contradiction can be turned to ''C'' by taking off the verb ''promise'' without any affection because the performative utterance here is implicit. If a verb does not seem to have a performative nature or can be interpreted differently, ''hereby'' can be added to reinforce its performative nature.
However, certain issues do go wrong with the performatives, those are called infelicities. For a performative utterance to fulfil its functions, it is indispensable for it to meet three felicity conditions, which were modified by Searle to become four. The first one is the propositional content condition, which is concerned with literal speech as it must be understood by the hearer or the audience. The second one is the preparatory condition. It puts stress on the obligation of the speech act to be real, not a role play etc. In other words, the conductor of the speech act must have the authority to do what the act speech meant to signify. The third one is the sincerity condition, which means that the addresser must be sincere in what he says and intends to do the act. The last one is the essential condition. It is that the speaker knows that his utterance will be acted upon by the addressee. Imagine, I am delivering a play and I say, ‘’I will change the rules of this country’’. The latter saying does not meet any of the felicity conditions. My saying does not meet the propositional content condition, because it is just a line play which is not literally understood. The citation does not hand in hand with the preparatory condition, because I do not have any authority to change the rules. My sentence doesn't meet also the sincerity condition, for the reason that I am not sincere and I do not intend to change any rules. And, of course, my utterance doesn't meet the essential condition, as I do not expect my words to be acted upon.
Furthermore, Austin has divided speech acts into three ones; locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. They can be all formulated as follows:
P says x.(locution)
He wants S to believe what he said.(illocution)
S believes him.(perlocution)
Initially, a locutionary act is building a sentence which is interpretable. An illocutionary act is the intention that the speaker tries to convey behind his sentence implicitly or explicitly. While a perlocutionary act is the effect or outcomes of the sentence being said on the hearer. The locutionary act by itself has got three subtypes under it. There is the phonic act which is about the process of producing a certain sound, which is not only adequate to the locutionary act, but it can also take place in writing. The other subtype is the phatic act which is arranging syntactically the produced sounds. The last subtype is the rhetic act. The latter is the performance of an act using vocables with a certain definite sense. Austin gives the following example:
(1) Phonetic act. He made some noises.
(2) Phatic act. He said, "The cat is on the mat."
(3) Rhetic-locutionary act. He said that the cat was on the mat.
Searle has developed the theory more by adding a speech acts taxonomy, which contains five types and four dimensions. The four dimensions are illocutionary point, the direction of fit between words and the world, expressed psychological state and propositional content. Unlike the illocutionary point, which is the reason why the speaker has put an utterance, the world-to-word direction of fit is concerned with achieving success in manifesting words in the material reality. Similarly, the expressed psychological state is the implicit side of the previously mentioned ''condition of sincerity'', as without which the condition would float. The last dimension is propositional content. It is the common content between different forms of illocutionary acts of one meaning. Let us take the following sentences:
- Alex will leave the café.
- Will Alex leave the café?
- If Alex will leave the café, I will also.
The sentences above are expressed quite differently, though; they express one preposition, which is that Alex will leave the café. This proposition is what is labelled as the propositional content.
The five types of speech acts according to Searle are representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives. Representatives (direction of fit: world to words. Expressed psychological state: belief) are acts that bind the speaker to say the truth, while claiming, stating, asserting, concluding, and reporting. Directives (w-w. desire) are as they indicate; they are to urge someone to do something, through advising, ordering, requesting, and commanding. It is related to the same dimension as the previous one, but here the speaker is making the words fit the world through the hearer. Commissives(w-w. intention), on the other hand, are to direct the speaker himself to do something in the future, the thing that is fulfilled through offering, promising and so on. Expressives(w-w: no. changeable), in contradiction, have nothing to do with directing, they are rather concerned with showing off the psychological situation of the speaker, such as when a person tries to apologise or thank etc. Lastly, come declarations(w-w. no eps), they are usually used politically, religously, and legally in order to indicate that something is decided to take its way, as in declaring war or naming a baby etc.
Moreover, Searle differentiates between direct and indirect speech acts. The direct speech act is the case where the communicative function and the utterance match one another. If one wants to declare, he uses directly a declarative sentence, if to ask he uses an interrogative sentence, and if to order he indeed uses an imperative sentence. On the other hand, an indirect speech act is one as Searle says, “Performed by means of another”. For a clear illustration, let us look at the following examples:
- Turn on the laptop.
- You are standing in front of the laptop.
- Could you turn on the laptop?
‘’A’’ here is direct as the communicative function is a request and the utterance is so as well. While in ‘’B’’, the means used is a declarative sentence to have an indirect function which is a request, the same for ‘’C’’ which is using interrogation as a means of making the request. People indeed use those indirect speech acts for the sake of politeness according to their cultures.
In conclusion, it is no doubt that language was meant by a high degree to perform actions within an accurate framework. Austin and thereafter Searle have dug inside the deep structure of language to find the forces by which the speech is made to be said and interpreted. Indeed, language as we can observe can turn out to be worth more than actions, words if used in their performative sense meeting the felicity conditions, are able to force whole actions to be performed at any level of human life. As we have seen major wars are performed only by three words from the military, ‘’we declare war’’.
Bibliography:
Austin, J. L., Urmson, J. O., & Sbisà, M. (1975). How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition (The William James Lectures) (2nd ed.). Harvard University Press.
Bach, K., & Harnish, R. M. (1982). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (0 ed.). The MIT Press.
Margalit, A. (2005). Meaning and Use (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 3) (1979th ed.). Springer.
Searle, J. R. (1970). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (New Ed). Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1999). Mind, Language, and Society (Masterminds (Paperback)) (1st ed.). Basic Books.
Burton D. (1981). Analysing Spoken Discourse. In Coulthard M. and Montgomery M. (eds. ) Studies in Discourse Analysis. Routledge and Kegan Paul. London.