Speech act theory, discourse structure and indirect speech
--> Smith, Peter Wilfred Hesling (1991) Speech act theory, discourse structure and indirect speech. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.
Speech Act Theory is concerned with the ways in which language can be used. It originated with Austin, but was developed by Searle. The theories of Austin and Searle are described and several problem areas are identified. If it is to be a viable theory of language usage, speech act theory must be able to integrate with a theory of discourse structure, because if speech acts are identifiable as units of language, then it must be possible include them in a model of discourse. The second chapter examines discourse structure, examining two rival theories: the discourse analysis approach and the conversational analysis approach. Discourse analysis is broadly sympathetic to speech act theory, whereas, conversational analysis is not. The claims of conversational analysis are examined and are found to be wanting in several respects. Speech Act Theory is then discussed with a particular emphasis on the problem of relating speech acts to each other within a larger unit of discourse. It is noted that Austin, by including the expositive class of speech acts, allows for the possibility of relations between speech acts, whereas Searle's description of speech acts effectively rules out any relations between speech acts. The third chapter develops speech acts in terms of a schematic model consisting of cognitive states, a presumed effect of the speech act and an action. The cognitive states are represented using modal and deontic operators on the proposition within epistemic logic. This idea of the description of a speech act in terms of cognitive states is developed in Chapter Four. In Chapter Four, speech acts are related using a communicated cognitive state to pair two speech acts together into a primary and secondary speech act. It is noted that the idea of a primary and secondary speech act is present within the discourse analysis model of discourse (in the form of the initiation-response cycle of exchanges) and also in the conversational analysis approach to discourse (in the form of the adjacency pair). The conclusion from this is that the two approaches are perhaps not so incompatible as might first appear. Chapter Five deals with grammatical sentence types and their possible use in communicating cognitive states. It also examines modal auxiliary verbs and their possible relationship to the modal and deontic operators used in the cognitive state model. In Chapter Six, theories of indirect speech acts are described. An explanation of indirect speech acts is developed using pragmatic maxims and cognitive states to explain why certain indirect forms are chosen. This leads to a theory of linguistic politeness and a use model of speech acts.
| Supervisors: | Holdcroft, D. |
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| Awarding institution: | University of Leeds |
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| Identification Number/EthosID: | uk.bl.ethos.438318 |
| Depositing User: | Ethos Import |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Mar 2010 12:52 |
| Last Modified: | 06 Mar 2014 16:54 |
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7 Speech Acts in Context
- Published: June 2023
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This paper argues for an Austin-inspired conception of speech acts as context-changing social actions. It explores some ways of conceiving of context in order to determine how context should be defined in this framework. It observes that the context against which Austin assesses infelicities consists of aspects of the world, while according to other speech act theorists, starting from John Searle, felicity conditions require that speakers have certain intentions and other appropriate attitudes. It argues that the context of a speech act should be considered as constructed as opposed to merely given, limited as opposed to extendible in any direction, and objective as opposed to cognitive. It explores whether these claims might be incompatible with each other, concluding that they are consistent. Finally, it takes into consideration the context-changing role of speech acts and the difference between its illocutionary dimension and its perlocutionary one.
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(1984) Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Speech act theory is a relatively recent subject of study in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of the mind. The movement appears to have commenced in 1962 with J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words. The impetus, however, came with the writings of John Searle, beginning with Speech Acts in 1969. -- To philosophers who study this phenomenon, the notion of intentionality is seen as a major component of any work of language used for human communication. Common background experiences and knowledge of speech acts of the common culture are other items of importance in the interpretation of an utterance. -- Because a literary work is a work in language, and since the purpose of language is communication, the literary work is viewed as discourse, and thereby subject to interpretation using speech act theory. The literary text becomes the mediary between writer and reader. The reader completes the speech act with his interpretation of the writer's utterance made manifest by the text. -- The major purpose of this paper has been to argue that a theory of speech acts is tenable as an approach to the interpretation and analysis of literary works at the classroom level. To that end, an overview of speech act theory is attempted, as well as a positing of literature as discourse. The conclusion proposed is that prior to any analysis of a literary work, along the lines of the New Criticism for instance, there must be an understanding of the utterance, and this is best accomplished from the point of view of speech act theory.
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 Downloads per month over the past year View more statistics What Is The Speech Act Theory: Definition and ExamplesFranksValli/Wikimedia Commons
Speech act theory is a subfield of pragmatics that studies how words are used not only to present information but also to carry out actions. The speech act theory was introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin in "How to Do Things With Words" and further developed by American philosopher John Searle. It considers the degree to which utterances are said to perform locutionary acts , illocutionary acts , and/or perlocutionary acts . Many philosophers and linguists, such as Andreas Kemmerling , study speech act theory as a way to better understand human communication. "Part of the joy of doing speech act theory, from my strictly first-person point of view," Kemmerling wrote, "is becoming more and more remindful of how many surprisingly different things we do when we talk to each other". Searle's Five Illocutionary PointsPhilosopher John Searle is responsible for devising a system of speech act categorization. "In the past three decades, speech act theory has become an important branch of the contemporary theory of language thanks mainly to the influence of [J.R.] Searle (1969, 1979) and [H.P.] Grice (1975) whose ideas on meaning and communication have stimulated research in philosophy and in human and cognitive sciences..." From Searle's view, there are only five illocutionary points that speakers can achieve on propositions in an utterance, namely:
Speakers achieve:
Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism"Since 1970 speech act theory has influenced...the practice of literary criticism. When applied to the analysis of direct discourse by a character within a literary work, it provides a systematic...framework for identifying the unspoken presuppositions, implications, and effects of speech acts [that] competent readers and critics have always taken into account, subtly though unsystematically. Speech act theory has also been used in a more radical way, however, as a model on which to recast the theory of literature...and especially...prose narratives. What the author of a fictional work—or else what the author's invented narrator—narrates is held to constitute a 'pretended' set of assertions, which are intended by the author, and understood by the competent reader, to be free from a speaker's ordinary commitment to the truth of what he or she asserts. Within the frame of the fictional world that the narrative thus sets up, however, the utterances of the fictional characters—whether these are assertions or promises or marital vows—are held to be responsible to ordinary illocutionary commitments," (Abrams and Galt Harpham 2005). Criticisms of Speech Act TheoryAlthough Searle's theory of speech acts has had a tremendous influence on functional aspects of pragmatics, it has also received very strong criticism. The Function of SentencesSome argue that Austin and Searle based their work principally on their intuitions, focusing exclusively on sentences isolated from the context where they might be used. In this sense, one of the main contradictions to Searle's suggested typology is the fact that the illocutionary force of a concrete speech act cannot take the form of a sentence as Searle considered it. "Rather, researchers suggest that a sentence is a grammatical unit within the formal system of language, whereas the speech act involves a communicative function separate from this." Interactional Aspects of Conversation"In speech act theory, the hearer is seen as playing a passive role. The illocutionary force of a particular utterance is determined with regard to the linguistic form of the utterance and also introspection as to whether the necessary felicity conditions —not least in relation to the speaker's beliefs and feelings—are fulfilled. Interactional aspects are, thus, neglected. However, [a] conversation is not just a mere chain of independent illocutionary forces—rather, speech acts are related to other speech acts with a wider discourse context. Speech act theory, in that it does not consider the function played by utterances in driving conversation is, therefore, insufficient in accounting for what actually happens in conversation," (Barron 2003).
 Essays in Speech Act Theory
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 Speech act theory and the analysis of conversations. Sequencing and interpretation in pragmatic theory Related PapersEssays in Speech Act Theory Jacques Moeschler  Allwood Jens One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics1 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. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics Iwona Plisiecka Dhanaji Nagane aseel kmahmood Language and Dialogue Razvan Saftoiu Dialogue and Universalism, 1, 2013, 129-142. Maciej Witek The paper reconstructs and discusses three different approaches to the study of speech acts: (i) the intentionalist approach, according to which most illocutionary acts are to be analysed as utterances made with the Gricean communicative intentions, (ii) the institutionalist approach, which is based on the idea of illocutions as institutional acts constituted by systems of collectively accepted rules, and (iii) the interactionalist approach, the main tenet of which is that performing illocutionary acts consists in making conventional moves in accordance with patterns of social interaction. It is claimed that, first, each of the discussed approaches presupposes a different account of the nature and structure of illocutionary acts, and, second, all those approaches result from one-sided interpretations of Austin’s conception of verbal action. The first part of the paper reconstructs Austin's views on the functions and effects of felicitous illocutionary acts. The second part reconstructs and considers three different research developments in the post-Austinian speech act theory—the intentionalist approach, the institutionalist approach, and the interactionalist approach. Craige Roberts There is evidence for the existence across all known languages of three basic clause types: declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Though this distinction in grammatical mood may be reflected in quite different ways (syntactic, morphological, lexical, etc.) in different languages, cross-linguistically we find a robust generalization: The choice of mood in a clausal utterance is reflected in a default correlation to one of the three basic types of move in a language game: making an assertion (declarative), posing a question (interrogative), or proposing to one's addressee(s) the adoption of a goal (imperative). This is in striking contrast to the lack of regular correlation between the conventional content of constituents and speech act types in the tradition of Austin and Searle. This paper sketches an approach to speech acts in which mood does not semantically determine illocutionary force. In a clause, the conventional content of mood determines the semantic type of the clause, and, given the nature of discourse, that type most naturally lends itself to serving as a particular type of speech act, i.e. to serving as one of the three basic types of language game moves. The type of semantics for grammatical mood that I assume is illustrated here with the imperative. As in earlier work, I take discourse to be a certain type of language game, with felicity tightly constrained by the goals and intentions of the interlocutors and, in particular, by the question under discussion. This pragmatic framework, together with the proposed semantics of mood, permits us to explain the kinds of contextual factors that lead to the attested Searlean interpretations of particular speech acts, and is compatible with a simple account of performatives in which performativity is epiphenomenal on the semantics of the predicates in question when used with a 1 st person subject. Loading Preview Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above. RELATED PAPERSGlobal Journal of Research in Humanities & Cultural Studies GJR Publication Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference Michel Paquette Advances in Language and Literary Studies Nguyen Van Han Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka LILIH INSYIRAH Barry Smith Loftur Árni Björgvinsson Journal of Pragmatics Maria de Ponte JOPR IAIN Salatiga Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans Language & Communication Marina Sbisa' Augustinian: A Journal for Humanities, Social Sciences, Business, and Education., Vol. 19, Issue #1, pp. 35-45 Napoleon Mabaquiao Journal of Linguistics Billy Clark Virginia Dutto Muhamad arifin Stina Bäckström Daniel Harris , Daniel Fogal Searle JR et al.(On) Searle on Conversation Andreas H. Jucker International Journal of Corpus Linguistics Martin Weisser ELSYA : Journal of English Language Studies Sikin Nuratika Ranndolf Javier RELATED TOPICS
Secondary MenuGsf graduate scholars colloquium 2023-24 series was a smashing success, may 30, 2024. GSF Certificate Students Cole Adams (PhD Candidate Literature) and Katherine Carithers (PhD Candidate English)  The Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies Graduate Scholars Colloquium, a student writers’ workshop and discussion series, provides a unique venue for graduate students to share and discuss works-in-progress with peers and faculty in the field. This year’s series, co-organized by Cole Adams (Literature) and Katherine Carithers (English), featured papers from a wide array of disciplines, and discussions provided presenters with feedback to hone their drafts as well as a space for intellectual exchange among Duke scholars working in and around GSF. In September, Duke/UNC German Studies PhD candidate Stephen Zaksewicz presented a dissertation chapter titled “The Embodied Planet: Sex and Gender in the Characters of Raoul Schrott” and Luca Pixner (Duke/UNC German Studies) gave a response. Stephen’s paper focused on the role of sexual imagery in the depiction of nature and the environment in contemporary Austrian novels. Both the paper and the group workshop focused on drawing connections between these novels and conversations in recent queer and feminist theory about ecology and the planet. For our next event, English PhD candidate Savannah Marciezyk presented a draft of her chapter, “Reading Women’s Literature as a Feminist Speech Act,” which draws on Ordinary Language Philosophy to theorize the project’s central conceptual framework of reading twentieth and twenty-first-century women’s literature as a “feminist speech act.” English PhD student Joelle Troiano responded, and the workshop focused on developing the unique work that a “feminist” speech act performs in the context of feminist activism and scholarship from the eighties until now. Joseph Hiller, Cultural Anthropology PhD candidate, closed out the fall series in November with a paper titled “Entre Las Chicas: Care, Abandonment, and Insistence in Colombian Prison Worlds.” Joe had just returned from fieldwork in Colombia, and the paper was based on ethnographic research with the Red Comunitaria Trans [Communitarian Trans Network], including the “Cuerpos en Prisión, Mentes en Acción” [Bodies in Prison, Minds in Action] working group, as well as his time as a “pasante de investigación” [research intern] with the Grupo de Prisiones [Prison Group] legal clinic at the University of the Andes School of Law. GSF Chair Professor Jennifer C. Nash gave the response and launched a spirited discussion about writerly practice, method, and the various valences of “care” in political movements and scholarly practice. Tania Rispoli, PhD candidate in Romance Studies (Italian track), launched the spring series in January with a chapter titled “Technologies of Care.” Drawing on feminist posthumanist theories, Tania’s interdisciplinary project integrated film, contemporary art, and novels to explore the modes of temporality and knowledge production that emerge from nonhuman and technological relations. In particular, Tania analyzed artworks featured in the Art Venice Biennale 2022, Denise Villeneuve's film Arrival , and Octavia Butler's Dawn to question how gender and racial differences function in technological and nonhuman relations in order to theorize a “politics of regeneration.” Associate Professor of GSF and Cultural Anthropology Ara Wilson responded, initiating a broader conversation around the role of aesthetics in political thinking. Following up in February, Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures PhD candidate Kelsey Brod gave a paper titled “The Concept of Number and the Computational Nonperformance of Floating-point Arithmetic,” which explored both the philosophical and practical aspects of floating-point arithmetic in computing. The paper considered how insights from Black studies and black feminist theory might change how we think about the ethics and politics of computation and media technologies in the present. Professor of Literature Luciana Parisi gave the response, which opened up a discussion about the aims of media theory, as well as how artistic practice can inform critical practice and vice versa. For our final colloquium of the year, PhD candidate in Biology Anita Simha presented an article co-authored with the plant biologist and women’s and gender studies professor Banu Subramaniam titled “Transient Ecologies: From Cybernetic Stories to Trans* Ecological Futures.” Drawing on their dual disciplinary knowledge in biology, ecology, and trans and queer studies, their article aims to move away from cybernetics as the site for interdisciplinary thinking and toward plant ecological studies, which tells a different history of ecology as a field. With this shift, they focus on how queer and trans* studies’ highly developed languages for indeterminacy, contingency, and change will facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation between disparate fields to foster what they call “a vegetal trans* ecology.” GSF Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of GSF and History, Gabriel Rosenberg, gave a response that initiated a deep discussion about interdisciplinary methods and recent debates in trans studies. Overall, this year’s GSF Graduate Scholars Colloquium was a smashing success. It hosted exciting, rigorous discussions and fostered new friendships over dinner. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation next year.
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This thesis, SPEECH ACT THEORY AND COMMUNICATION: A UNIVEN STUDY, is an investigation into the communicative competence of a group of second language speakers. The study employs Speech Act Theory, a discourse evaluation method within the cross-cultural paradigm, to ascertain the structural
The speech act theory is a theory in the philosophy of language which rigorously attempts. to systematically explain the workings of language. Its wide influence has transcended the confines. of ...
Speech Act Theory is one of the core contents of modern pragmatics, originating from Austin's exploration of three philosophical. issues: (1) the relationship between the everyday language and the ...
The phenomena of speech acts do not only occur in real life situation but also in movies since they are a reflection of human`s real life. The characters‟ dialogues reflect human communication which consists of speech act. They apply speech acts in their utterances to deliver their intended purposes such as when the characters ask
Speech act theory was put forward by Austin and further developed by Searle in the 1960s. It has become established as one of the central theories in pragmatics. This entry will offer an overview of speech act theory by introducing and analyzing utterances of constatives and performatives, layers of speech acts (i.e., locutionary, illocutionary ...
Speech Act Theory - A Critical Overview. Loftur Árni Björgvinsson. This paper examines J.L. Austin's theory regarding speech acts, or how we do things with words. It starts by reviewing the birth and foundation of speech act theory as it appeared in the 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard before going into what Austin's theory is and how ...
Speech act theory and the analysis of conversations. Sequencing and interpretation in pragmatic theory ... Vanderveken (1994, 53) gives an explicit version of this thesis when asserting
In arguing for this thesis, I show how Searle, in his attempt to defend Austin and Speech Act Theory against Derrida's criticisms, failed to appreciate many aspects of Derrida's work and thus misconstrued his critique and defended Austin and Speech Act Theory against somewhat of a straw man.
For sure, both Speech act theory and Pragmatics intend to study linguistic phenomena left unexplained by the grammatical or logical analysis of language, which constituted the orthodox view in the analytic philosophy of language during the twentieth century. This lack was already noticed at the beginning of the 20th.
Speech Act Theory is concerned with the ways in which language can be used. It originated with Austin, but was developed by Searle. The theories of Austin and Searle are described and several problem areas are identified. If it is to be a viable theory of language usage, speech act theory must be able to integrate with a theory of discourse structure, because if speech acts are identifiable as ...
Fillmore (1981), this report employs Speech Act Theory, as an utterance analysis tool, to establish the connection between grammatical forms and language functions, in specific contexts. ... In this thesis, communication is viewed as behaviour dependent on multiple variables, such as the nature of the language used, the context of .
Speech act theory is one of the fields in the philosophy of language in which consideration of context was introduced earliest. Already for Austin, context was part of what philosophers of language have to elucidate, namely "the total speech act in the total speech situation" (Austin 1975, 148).In consideration of the close association between speech act and context, the way in which the ...
Searle claims that his theory of speech acts illuminates several problems in contemporary philosophy, and in particular that it shows up three common fallacies. First, there is what he calls "the naturalistic fallacy fallacy"-namely, the thesis that it is impossible to derive evaluative from descriptive statements (p. I32).
speech acts. The use of expressive speech acts is an utterance that represents the psychological or emotional feelings of the speaker. This study aims to analyze the expressive speech acts of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Atticus Finch. This expressive speech act analysis research uses the theory proposed by Yule (1996) and Norrick (1978).
the essence of what is called the Speech Act Theory. Speech act theory provides us with a means of digging beneath the surface of discourse and establishing the function of what is said (Cook 1992). In other words, speech act theory attempts to explain how speakers use language to accomplish intended actions and how hearers infer intended meaning
Speech act theory is a relatively recent subject of study in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of the mind. The movement appears to have commenced in 1962 with J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words. The impetus, however, came with the writings of John Searle, beginning with Speech Acts in 1969. ... Masters thesis, Memorial ...
This thesis examines some of the ways in which a particular theory of language known as Speech Act theory has been used as a hermeneutic tool, in particular in relation to Biblical hermeneutics. It begins by outlining the context in which the theory was conceived, and gives a brief description of Speech Act theory and some of its problems.
Updated on June 07, 2024. Speech act theory is a subfield of pragmatics that studies how words are used not only to present information but also to carry out actions. The speech act theory was introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin in "How to Do Things With Words" and further developed by American philosopher John Searle.
This comprehensive work provides numerous essays by specialists in the field on speech act theory. Topics include: verbal mood and sentence mood in the tradition of universal grammar; utterance acts and speech acts; illocutionary morphology and speech acts; and speech acts and relevance theory.
Review of Research on Development o f Speech Act Theory and Its Applicatio n. Leilei Zou and Zhu Yiye . 1 Professor, College of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Ocean University, China. 2 College of ...
Tambunan (2018), in her thesis entitled "Expressive Speech Acts in Ellen Show: An Interview with Ed Sheeran". The aim of her research was to analyze the most dominant expressive speech act, and the implication of the speech act. The result of the research shows that the writer had found 5 expressive speech acts
The main criticism I would address to a theory of meaning like speech act theory is that it is basically a theory of literal meaning. Indirect speech acts, metaphors, irony, are analysed within speech act theory (cf. Searle 1979) as derived speech acts. Within Relevance theory, we can make a different claim.
speech act theory to the analysis of conversation. This debate (cf. Searle et al. 1992) has to be interpreted as a reactive move rather than as a natural. extension of the domain of speech act ...
A CRITICAL LOOK AT SPEECH ACT THEORY. Jens Allwood. Dept of Linguistics, Göteborg University. One of the most powerful theoretical conceptions behind current research in pragmatics. 1. is the ...
GSF Honors Thesis / Graduation with Distinction. Research Grants & Awards ... the group workshop focused on drawing connections between these novels and conversations in recent queer and feminist theory about ecology and the planet. ... and the workshop focused on developing the unique work that a "feminist" speech act performs in the ...