Access to the full content is only available to members of institutions that have purchased access. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order.


Print

Speech acts

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-U043-1
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-U043-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/speech-acts/v-1

Article Summary

Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language, but there are all sorts of other things we can do with words. We can make requests, ask questions, give orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies and so on. Moreover, almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker’s intention; there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one’s audience.

The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory. It must systematically classify types of speech acts and the ways in which they can succeed or fail. It must reckon with the fact that the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence ‘This is a pig sty’ might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy, and further to demand indirectly that it be tidied up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a farmyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning – in particular, the meaning of the word ‘this’ does not determine which area is being referred to. A major task for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in what they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning underdetermines use.

In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker’s intention, the attitude being expressed.

Some speech acts, however, are not primarily acts of communication and have the function not of communicating but of affecting institutional states of affairs. They can do so in either of two ways. Some officially judge something to be the case, and others actually make something the case. Those of the first kind include judges’ rulings, referees’ decisions and assessors’ appraisals, and the latter include sentencing, bequeathing and appointing. Acts of both kinds can be performed only in certain ways under certain circumstances by those in certain institutional or social positions.

Print
Citing this article:
Bach, Kent. Speech acts, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-U043-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/speech-acts/v-1.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

Related Articles