6. Speech Acts

6. Speech Acts

John L. Austin (1911-1960)

• an Oxfordian philosopher and linguist

• influenced by Wittgenstein and his second phase, the oxford school dealt with ordinary language

• a leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy that flourished between c. 1940 and 1965 in Oxford

• both schools of early analytic philosophy ended unsuccessfully:

• Cambridge and Vienna philosophers were not able to construct an ideal language

• Oxford philosophy “dissolved” in linguistics when analysing ordinary languages

Over-simplification

• Austin’s series of lectures, both published by students after his death (didn’t published anything when alive:

• How to Do Things with Words (1962)

• Sense and Sensibilia (1962) – named after Austen’s book, he admired her

• the main problem of ideal language philosophy is over-simplification: natural languages are too complex to be reduced to a few rules

• philosophers and linguists like to come up with well-arranged categories and round numbers: two, three, four, ten, twelve, etc.

Pragmatics

• main achievement of Oxford school was the appreciation of pragmatics (not invented by them, it probably started in Wittgenstein II)

• syntax and semantics are not enough for understanding language, meaning depends on a context and non-linguistic reality

• Austin pointed out that the picture theory of language based on the verification principle is incomplete: we can understand sentences because we know their truth-value, but there are many declarative statements without truth-value (“Sentences are not as such either true or false.”)

Performative utterances

• there are two kinds of utterances:

• constatives – they describe something

• performatives – they do something, they can do something real in the real world

• examples of performative utterances:

• “I do. (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)” – as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony.

• “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” – as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem.

• “I give and bequeath my watch to my brother.” – as occurring in a will.

• “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.”

Speech acts

• theory of speech acts was invented by Austin and his student John Searle; speech act is every situation when language is used (vague), they are very general facts, you cannot talk without dealing with them

• speech acts have three levels of explication:

• locutionary act – the actual utterance based on grammatical rules, i.e. phonetics, syntax, and semantics

• illocutionary act – the meaning intended by a speaker (the meaning speaker has in the mind while uttering a sentence)

• perlocutionary act – the effect on an addressee

• Austin tried to make a list of all English verbs with illocutionary force and identified more than a thousand of them; e.g. asking, answering, assuring, warning, sentencing, acquitting, diagnosing, excommunicating, resigning, promising, betting, apologizing, toasting, postulating, defining, etc.