Having touched upon Grice’s central ideas, which are, in turn, central to Pragmatics, we now turn to other aspects of the speech situation which are considered to be essential within Pragmatic studies.
3.3. Speech Acts
Cheers! The speech act of making a toast
The basic belief that language is used to perform actions led John Austin and John Searle to develop a theory of Speech Acts. In the famous lectures3 that were posthumously published as How to Do Things with
3 The William James Lectures, delivered by Austin at Harvard in 1955.
g a toast.
Words, Austin (1962) set about demolishing the view that truth conditions should be considered as central to language understanding. He developed a general theory of illocutionary acts, which, in turn, became a central concern of general pragmatic theory. In saying something, Austin observes, we are also doing something, and, hence, three kinds of acts are simultaneously performed:
1. Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with a determinate sense and reference.
2. Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it.
3. Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering a sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance (Austin, 1962: 101-02).
In order to illustrate the difference between the three types of acts, consider the following utterance:
(A woman to her friend):
I have a new and very expensive diamond necklace. Would you like to borrow it?
Here, the locutionary act would simply be the uttering of a sentence meaning that the woman has a new and expensive necklace and that she asks her friend if she wants to borrow it. The illocutionary act would in a way be the effect of the locutionary act, i.e. the function fulfilled by the locution, which in this case is an offer. The intended perlocutionary effect/act, however, might be for the woman to impress her friend, or perhaps to show a friendly attitude. But perlocutions may be intended or unintended, so in this case an unintended possible perlocutionary effect could be for the interlocutor to feel offended because she interpreted that her friend was trying to belittle her by implying that she could never have or buy such an expensive necklace.
The term speech act has come to refer exclusively to the second kind of act, i.e. the illocutionary act, since this is the one that seems to present the richest developments and interpretations within pragmatic theory. In English (as in other languages), sometimes sentences contain linguistic expressions that serve to indicate the illocutionary force of the sentence.
Consider the following examples:
1) I promise I will not do that again.
2) I order you to stop talking.
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Only certain verbs (which Austin called performatives), like order or promise, have the property of allowing the speaker to do the action the verb names by using the verb in a certain way. Other verbs cannot be used in this way, and thus, for instance, saying “I nag you to pick up your clothes” is not nagging (Green, 1989: 67).
Searle’s (1969) later systematization of Austin’s work, in which he proposes a typology of speech acts based on felicity conditions (the social and cultural criteria that have to be met for the act to have the desired effect), became very influential. Austin and Searle’s position can be formulated by saying that all utterances not only express propositions, but also perform actions. The illocutionary act, or, more simply, the speech act, is at a privileged level within these actions. Searle’s typology of speech acts is rooted in the range of illocutionary verbs that occur in a given language. According to this author, then, there are five basic kinds of action that a speaker can perform by means of the following five types of utterance:
1) Representatives: Acts which commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (e.g.:
concluding, asserting).
2) Directives: Attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (e.g.: questioning, requesting, ordering, begging, forbidding, instructing, urging, warning).
3) Commissives: Acts which commit the speaker to some future course of action (e.g.: promising, threatening, offering, guaranteeing, pledging, swearing, vowing, undertaking, warranting, inviting, offering, swearing, volunteering ).
4) Expressives: Acts which express a psychological state (e.g.: apologizing, welcoming, thanking, appreciating, congratulating, deploring, detesting, regretting).
5) Declaratives: Acts which bring about immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and thus tend to rely on extra-linguistic institutions (e.g.: christening, declaring war, excommunicating, sentencing (a convict to Capital Punishment), pronouncing (a couple husband and wife), naming (e.g. a ship)).
Another contribution of Searle’s (1975) is the development of a theory of indirect speech acts. He based his theory on the observation that by uttering, for instance, what appears to be a question (e.g.: Don’t you think that dress is beautiful?) a speaker may be indirectly performing another type of illocutionary act, such as a request (e.g.: Please, buy me that dress!). In order to interpret indirect speech acts, hearers rely upon their knowledge of speech acts, as well as on the general principles of cooperative conversation, mutually shared factual information and a general ability to draw inferences (Schiffrin, 1994). All these facts led Searle to observe that we often do more than one thing at once in the same utterance, and this is part of the important issue of indirect speech acts.
For instance, the sentence I won’t give you the candy unless you behave, uttered by a father to his son, may be interpreted as both an assertion (Representative), which would be the “literal” act, and a threat (commissive), which would be the “primary” act. Even more, it could also be interpreted as a request or an order (directive) from the father to the child.
The declarative act of christening
In spite of the undeniable merits of speech act theory (which lie in advancing a view of language use as action), some authors have criticized the universalistic claims of Searle’s version of the theory. For example, linguistic anthropologists such as Du Bois (1993) or Duranti (1993) have
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shown its limited applicability to non-Western modes of communication.
3.3.1. Examples and analysis
Examine the speech acts performed by the writer of the following letter to the “We hear you” column in the Oprah Magazine (December 2002 issue):
(1) Thank you for publishing the article on antibiotic-resistant bacteria [”The Microbe that Roared”, September]. (2) My 77-year-old father just finished a six-week course of vancomycin to treat a bout of Staphylococcus aureus. This painful infection was initially misdiagnosed as arthritis. (3) The guidelines you provided for protecting ourselves and our loved ones were also particularly helpful. You have passed on information that may help save many lives.
BTF, Boulder, Colorado
The above letter can be divided into three main discourse sequences containing three different types of speech acts:
a) Expressive (Thanking): Thank you for publishing…..
b) Representatives (Asserting: giving information about facts): My 77-year-old father just finished… This painful infection was….
c) Representatives/Expressives (Asserting and complimenting or acknowledging at the same time): The guidelines you provided for protecting ourselves… You have passed on information that may help save many lives.
(2) and (3) belong to the same broad category, but while the speech acts in the former fulfil the function of giving information, in (3) we can speak of a combination of two categories because by asserting (Representative act) that the guidelines provided were very helpful and may help save many lives, the writer is also complimenting the magazine and acknowledging its usefulness (Expressive act). We therefore see that the letter contains three clear speech act sequences: the first part aims at expressing gratitude for previously publishing the article in the magazine, the second part aims at informing about certain facts which somehow explain the writer’s gratitude, and the third and last part is devoted to complimenting the editors for including such good articles in their magazine.
3.4. Reference
Many terms or expressions used in discourse have a referring function.
This function seems to be exclusive of human language (as opposed to other animal communication systems), as Hockett and Altmann (1968: 63-4) note when dealing with the phenomenon of “aboutness”, presented by these authors as one of the distinctive characteristics that define any human language. Thus, in using a human language we are able to talk about things that are external to ourselves which may be either in our immediate surroundings or at a distant location or time.
The prototypical words or expressions displaying reference are demonstratives and indexicals (e.g. You, him, that woman, this house, here, there, his wife), singular definite terms (e.g. the man sitting at the corner, the author of Paradise Lost, my sons) and proper names (e.g.
Rome, Peter Walsh, the Queen Mary (a ship), Picasso). These terms refer to an entity within either the text or the context of utterance. Thus, “they unequivocally “pick out” some particular, definite individual or object”
(Carlson, 2004: 76).
Referents are often introduced into discourse by using terms that are indefinite and explicit (e.g. a man I met yesterday) and continued with terms that are definite and inexplicit (e.g.: he). Definiteness has to do with the speaker’s assumption that the hearer will be able to identify a single, specific entity to which the speaker intends to refer. Explicitness has to do with the presentation of information that actually enables H to correctly identify a referent (Schiffrin, 1994).
As Schiffrin notes, “scholars often view the process of referring to entities in the universe of discourse as pragmatic –simply because it is a process involving speakers, their intentions, actions, and knowledge” (1994: 197).
A group of engineers discussing technical facts based on mutual knowledge.
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In effect, some types of reference depend on mutual knowledge.
Referring to an entity with the expectation that the hearer will be able to make a similar identification depends upon mutual knowledge, beliefs and suppositions. Thus, the process by which referring expressions refer to an entity is not strictly semantic or truth-conditional; it is also pragmatic. For example, if I want to refer to my friend Gretchen, I may use definite or indefinite expressions like: Gretchen, a workmate of mine, a woman I work with, Dr. Dobrott, someone I met six years ago, Professor Dobrott, etc., and the use of one or other expression will depend on my intentions, as well as on my assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge of my friend.
3.4.1. Types of reference
Following Martin & Rose (2007), we shall identify six types of reference, namely:
1) Anaphoric: reference that looks backward in the surrounding text. E.g.: That’s my friend Sally. She is an attorney (where
“She” refers back to “my friend Sally”).
2) Bridging: reference that looks indirectly backwards; it is a kind of inferred anaphoric reference. E.g.: The criminal shot a man in the street and the gun was found two days later (where “the gun” refers indirectly backwards to the verb
“shoot”, since the most likely thing for someone to shoot with is a gun).
3) Cataphoric: reference that looks forward in the text. E.g.:
Immediately after she saw him, Peggy turned round and left the room (where “she” refers forward to “Peggy”).
4) Esphoric: reference that looks forward within the same