The speech act theory is a pragmatic theory of language based on communication. For Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), the concept of the speech act was viewed as an extension of the theory of meaning in natural language. They introduced the idea that apart from conveying information, words can actually do things. Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) pointed that when we speak, we are also doing things, not just uttering words (see Searle, Kiefer and Bierwisch 2012 for a summary of the Speech Act Theory). In this regard, the speech act theory states that there is more to communication than information transfer. It introduces the idea that, besides conveying information, words can actually do things, and that when we speak, we are also doing things, not just uttering words (Searle, Kiefer and Bierwisch, 2012). This can be understood with the example phrase ‘I name my baby Nawaf.’ By making this declaration, a person is actually changing the baby’s status. In other words, s/he is changing the status of the baby from having no name to having the name Nawaf by which he will be called. Whenever the speaker utters a sentence, s/he is trying to do several things at once: he is trying to do something with words, s/he is intending to affect the listener and s/he wants him/her to get her/his intention.
John Langshaw Austin was the first philosopher to introduce the speech act theory in his most influential work, How to Do Things with Words, published in 1962. He represented the ordinary language philosophy and maintained that one of the main purposes of language was to carry socially significant actions out. In his book, he pointed out that language is used to do and assert things, adding that speech acts are a functional unit of communication. Austin’s main purpose was to challenge the view that the only the function of language, philosophically and linguistically, was to make
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true or false statements (Lyons, 1981). Later, Searle developed the work by Austin. He defined speech acts as “the basic or minimal units of linguistic communication”
(Searle, 1969, p. 16)
.
Austin (1962) argued that there are three aspects of speech acts,based on the fact that “Whole speech acts, not sentences as such, are the units of language in need of analysis” (Smith, 2003, p. 34). The first is locution, the second illocution and the third perlocution.
Austin (1962) defines a locutionary act as a generated sound of a simple speech act. These sounds are linked by grammatical conventions whose goal is to say
something meaningful (Bagariü and Djigunoviü, 2007). Among English speakers, for
example, “It’s raining” performs the locutionary act of saying that it is raining, as “Grablistrod zetagflx dapu” would not (Garth, 2011). The locutionary act is not as ambiguous as the other speech acts. Locutionary acts refer to the literal meaning of utterances produced by the speaker. Locutionary acts can come in any form, (e.g. statement, question, etc.). According to Bach and Harnish (1979) and Pandy (2008), there are three aspects of the locutionary act:
• a phonetic act by uttering certain noises
• a phatic act by uttering certain vocables or words
• a rhetic act where sentences or its parts are used in a specific way or based on
a specific reference which matches meaning
Some authors, like Searle, criticized these aspects and completely rejected Austin’s ideas. Searle (1968) argues that the rhetic act, as described by Austin, is a reformulated explanation of the illocutionary act, suggesting instead what he calls the “propositional act”. This propositional act expresses the proposition, which is the content of the utterance. Searle (1969) defines it as the speech act from speakers in
instances where an utterance is being presented.
On the other hand, Wardhaugh (1992) says that propositional acts are those matters that deal with referring and predicating. He adds that it is important to use language to refer to matters in the world and to make predictions about such matters. In order to complete the speech act, propositional acts should be expressed in the performance of an illocutionary act, since they cannot occur alone. Searle notes that, even if propositional acts have to have illocutionary acts for them to be expressed, not all illocutionary acts should have a proposition. In fact, utterances which are also expressions of a person’s state, as in the utterances “Ouch!” or “Damn!”, are not considered to have any proposition (Searle 1976, p. 30). Searle further modified Austin’s ideas by introducing the utterance acts. He states that these acts are simple utterings of morphemes, words and sentences, and that utterance acts are very much like Austin’s phonetic and phatic ‘sub–acts’. Finally, Searle (1976) developed Austin’s ideas by introducing propositional acts, illocutionary acts and utterance acts.The illocutionary act is the second aspect of speech acts and is considered the main theory of the speech act. It refers to the social function of what is said. While the locutionary act is concerned with producing a certain sentence with reference, the illocutionary act is the act performed by uttering the sentence. It is made by the communicative force of an utterance, being also called the ‘illocutionary force of the utterance’. It illustrates how the entire utterance will be taken in the conversation (Yule, 1996: 48). The illocutionary act can be defined as “the speech act of doing something else, offering advice or taking a vow, for example, in the process of uttering meaningful language” (Brown, 2005, p. 90). El Hiani (2015, p. 480) regards illocutionary acts as having “a specific force on the interlocutor. This force is typically conventional (shared by members of a social group) between the speaker and
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the hearer.”. Justova also explains that “the illocutionary act is closely connected with the speaker’s intentions, e.g. stating, questioning, promising, requesting, giving commands, threatening and many others” (2006, p. 13). Austin (1962) considers illocutionary acts “performatives”. He further states that there are two types of performatives: implicit and explicit. An explicit performative contains a performative verb which is clear to the listener and which holds a straightforward meaning. An example is in the statement, “I promise to come to the party”. The performative verb in the statement is in the word “promise”, being a declarative utterance (Lyons, 1981,
p.728–729). In contrast, implicit performatives do not have performative verbs, as in
the statement: “I will come to the party.”, so the context is important in determining the intention of the speaker in his or her utterance.
Searle presented a list which he considered “basic categories of the illocutionary acts” (Searle, 1976, p. 10). He relates this classification to Austin’s in the following basic categories:
• assertive
• directive
• commissive
• expressive
• declaration
An assertive is the illocutionary act that represents a statement of how things are. It is also a state of affairs represented by an illocutionary act, i.e. stating, describing, claiming, telling, hypothesizing, suggesting, insisting, asserting or swearing (Schane, 2014). An assertive can be described as an utterance that transfers information from an agent (speaker) to another agent (hearer). Searle (1976, p. 10)
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explains it by saying “the point or purpose of the members of the representative class is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something being the case, to the truth of the expressed proposition. All of the members of the representative class are assessable on the dimension of assessment which includes true and false”. An example of an assertive is “It is snowing”.
A directive is another category of illocutionary acts. This category is about the speaker getting the listener to do an action. An example is in the statement ‘Please bring me the book.’ Searle (1976, p. 11) states:
The illocutionary point of these consists in the fact that they are attempts […] by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. They may be very modest ‘attempts’ as when I invite you to do it or suggest that you do it, or they may be very fierce attempts as when I insist that you do it.
Verbs in this category include: advise, plead, command, permit, beg, pray, order, request, entreat, invite and ask. Searle added the verbs ‘dare’, ‘challenge’ and ‘defy’,that Austin had listed as behabitives to the directive category. He also states that “many of Austin’s exercitives are also in this class” (Searle, 1976, p. 11).
A commisive is an illocutionary speech act category where the speaker obliges himself to do something. An example would be “I promise to not be late again.”. Searle disagrees with Austin’s definition of a commissive. He says that to him it seemed “unexceptional” and he added “I will simply appropriate it as it stands with the cavil that several of the verbs he lists as commissive verbs do not belong in this class at all, such as “shall”, “intend”, “favour”, and others” (1976, p. 11). Searle, then, defines commissives as “those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker (again in varying degrees) to some future course of action” (1976, p. 11). Commisives are vows, pledges, oaths, promises and threats (Schiffman, 1997).
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An expressive is another category of the illocutionary speech act. The expressive speech acts purpose is to express the speaker’s attitude and feelings. They are “speech acts that make assessments of psychological states or attitudes” (Schiffman, 1997). An example is “I love to watch TV.” Expressives can be used in congratulating, greeting, thanking, deploring, condoling, welcoming and apologising. The greeting speech act, the core of our study, falls under the category of expressives, according to Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts.
Last, but not least in the illocutionary speech act category, we find the declaration, which Searle (1976, p. 15) considers “a very special category of speech acts”. Declarations are utterances that make changes and also change reality. A
declaration is “an illocutionary act thatbrings into existence the state of affairs to
which it refers” (Schane, 2014). Searle, (1976, p. 13) states that
It is the defining characteristic of this class that the successful performance of one of its members brings about the correspondence between the propositional content and reality, successful performance guarantees that the propositional content corresponds to the world: if I successfully perform the act of appointing you chairman, then you are chairman; if I successfully perform the act of nominating you as candidate, then you are a candidate; if I successfully perform the act of declaring a state of war, then war is on; if I successfully perform the act of marrying you, then you are married.
Declarations include blessings, baptisms or juridical activities, including sentencing and similar acts (Schiffman, 1997). An example of a declarative is “I hereby pronounce you man and wife”.
The third and last type of speech act introduced by Austin is the perlocutionary act. It is the effect of what the speaker’s meaningful utterances have on those who hear it and what they do in response to it. Unlike locutionary acts,
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perlocutionary acts are external to the performance. Martinich and de Gruyter (1984) mention that Austin (1955, p. 121) was of the opinion that: “Perlocutionary acts, in contrast with locutionary and illocutionary acts which are governed by conventions, are not conventional but natural acts”. They add that “Persuading, angering, inciting,
etc., cause physiological changes in theaudience, either in their states or behaviour;
conventional acts do not”. Illocutionary speech acts can be in the form of inspiring, persuading or deterring, etc. acts.
In the perlocutionary instance, an act is performed by saying something. For example, if someone shouts 'Fire!' and by that act causes people to exit a building which they believe to be on fire, they have performed the perlocutionary act of convincing other people to exit the building […] In another example, if a jury foreperson declares 'guilty' in a courtroom in which an accused person sits the illocutionary act of declaring a person guilty of a crime has been undertaken. The perlocutionary act related to that illocution is that, in reasonable circumstances, the accused person would be convinced that they were to be led from the courtroom into a jail cell. Perlocutionary acts are acts intrinsically related to the illocutionary act which precedes them, but discrete and able to be differentiated from the illocutionary act (Gelber, 2002, p. 56).
To summarize the speech acts types, Leech (1983, p. 199, in Justová, 2006, p. 11) defines them in the following way:
• “locutionary act: performing an act of saying something”
• “illocutionary act: performing an act in saying something”
• “perlocutionary act: performing an act by saying something”.
Some ethnographers of communication have also investigated speech acts and one of the major contributions to the field was by Dell Hymes (Johnstone and Marcellino, 2010, p. 2). His theory was that “speech acts are functional units in communication and are governed by the socio–cultural rules of communication in a given speech community” (Morkus, 2009, p. 25). Hymes presented socio–cultural
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norms which impact on speakers and the interpretation of speech. This was important because it helped to establish cross–cultural speech act research, with Hymes’ theory being a major element of cross–cultural speech act research (Morkus, 2009).
The taxonomy for understanding that communication contains speech acts acting as units was also another contribution by Hymes. Speech situations, speech events and speech acts are parts of the taxonomy presented by Hymes (1972). By ‘speech situation’, Hymes refers to a speech situation that is based on a social context, meaning that it happens in a speech community (Schmidt and Richards, 1980). The speech situation may refer to “ceremonies, fights, hunts, meals, lovemaking, and the like” (Kiesling and Paulston, 2008, p. 7). The second part of the taxonomy introduced
by Hymes (1972) is called speech events.Communication ethnographers say that “the
speech event, constituted by the interaction of several components of which language is only one, is the basic unit of every day communication, not clause or sentence” (Leeds–Hurwitz, 2005, p. 342). Hymes (2013, p. 52) states that “the term speech event will be restricted to activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech. An event may consist of a single speech act, but will often comprise several”. These speech events occur in the speech situation. An example of a speech event is in “the exchange of vows in a speech event occurring within a wedding (a speech situation)” (Johnstone and Marcellino, 2010). Duranti (1985, p. 201) elaborates on speech events as follows:
In a class lecture, a trial, a Ph.D. defence, an interview, or a phone conversation, speech is crucial and the event would not be said to be taking place without it. Hymes calls this kind of event a speech event. In many other cases, speech has a minor role, subordinate to other codes or forms of interaction. Hymes refers to the latter type of event as a speech situation.
The last part of Hymes’ (1972) taxonomy is called speech acts. Hymes (1972, cited in Marcellino and Johnstone, 2010, p. 7) also points out that “speech acts are the individual utterances that form the minimal unit of analysis for ethnographies of communication”. Schmidt and Richards (1980, p. 129) define them as the elements making up speech events. The speech act theory relates to functions and applications
of language; in fact, in the broadest sense, these are acts carried out through speech.
Hymes (Johnstone and Marcellino, 2010) consider parties to be speech situations, with conversations at parties being speech events and jokes in the conversation as speech acts.
A major contribution was the introduction by Hymes of the communicative competence concept. This concept was the start of the empirical investigation of
speech acts (Boxer and Pickering, 1995). According to Bagariü and Djigunoviü
(2007), communicative competence was the theoretical foundation of speech acts and was also considered important to the field of second language education, especially because the concepts of performance and competence were considered the communicative procedure of applied linguistics. However, a strong dissatisfaction was also evident once these concepts were standardized for testing, teaching and learning foreign languages. This led to the formulation of a wider concept by Hymes, termed communicative competence, with the potential to judge grammatical
competence in varied situations (Bagariü and Djigunoviü, 2007). Later Rickheit and
Strohner (2008), stated this concept was a fundamental factor for an individual to lead a proper social life. Hence, it can be considered that communicative competence is an issue that comprises innumerable empirical as well as theoretical approaches for
spreading awareness and knowledge of a second language (Rickheit and Strohner, 2008). The following section will discuss this in detail.