Speech Acts

When we speak we can do all sorts of things, from aspirating a consonant, to constructing a relative clause, to insulting a guest, to starting a war. These are all, pre-theoretically, speech acts—acts done in the process of speaking. The theory of speech acts, however, is especially concerned with those acts that are not completely covered under one or more of the major divisions of grammar—phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics—or under some general theory of actions. Even in cases in which a particular speech act is not completely described in grammar, formal features of the utterance used in carrying out the act might be quite directly tied to its accomplishment, as when we request something by uttering an imperative sentence or greet someone by saying, “Hi!” Thus, there is clearly a conventional aspect to the study of speech acts. Sometimes, however, the achievement cannot be so directly tied to convention, as when we thank a guest by saying, “Oh, I love chocolates.” There is no convention of English to the effect that stating that one loves chocolates counts as an act of thanking. In this case, the speaker’s INTENTION in making the utterance and a recognition by the addressee of that intention under the conditions of utterance clearly plays an important role. Note that whether convention or intention seems paramount, success is not guaranteed. The person to whom the conventionalized greeting “Hi!” is addressed might not speak English, but some other language in which the uttered syllable means “Go away!”, or the guest may not have brought chocolates at all, but candied fruit, in which cases these attempts to extend a greeting and give a complement are likely to fail. On the other hand, failure, even in the face of contextual adversity, is also not guaranteed. Thus, one may succeed in greeting a foreigner who understands nothing of what is being said by making it clear through gesture and tone of voice that that is the intent. Much of speech act theory is therefore devoted to striking the proper balance between convention and intention. Real-life acts of speech usually involve interpersonal relations of some kind: A speaker does something with respect to an audience by saying certain words to that audience. Thus it would seem that ethnographic studies of such relationships and the study of discourse should be central to speech act theory, but in fact, they are not. Such studies have been carried out rather independently of the concerns of those philosophers and linguists who have devoted their attention to speech acts. This is perhaps not a good thing, as Croft (1994) has argued, but since it is the case, anthropological and discoursebased approaches to speech acts will not be covered in this handbook entry.