A Critical Look at Speech Act Theory

One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics is the idea that a theory of linguistic communication is really only a special case of a general theory of human action. According to this view, the various linguistic subdisciplines such as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics should be regarded as the studies of different abstract aspects of underlying communicative actions. Explanation of variation within each subdiscipline should preferably be functional, i.e. it should relate the properties of the phenomenon being examined to the function of a communicative action as a whole. If this task could be accomplished, the functionalist claim is that linguistic theory would simultaneously achieve both increased exhaustiveness and greater internal coherence and simplicity.