the theory of speech acts

Speech Acts

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century. [ 1 ] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines. [ 2 ] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

2.1 the independence of force and content, 2.2 can saying make it so, 2.3 seven components of illocutionary force, 3. illocutions and perlocutions, and indirect speech acts, 4. force, fit and satisfaction, 5.1 force conventionalism, 5.2. an objection to force conventionalism, 6.1 grice's account of speaker meaning, 6.2 objections to grice's account, 6.3 force as an aspect of speaker meaning, 7.1 speech acts and conversation analysis, 7.2 speech acts and scorekeeping, 8. force-indicators and the logically perfect language, 9. do speech acts have a logic, further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language. Accordingly in this entry I will consider the relation among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions, and implicature. This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

Above I shuddered with quotation marks around the expression ‘speech act theory’. It is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their most significant features. Consider a different case. Semantic theory deserves its name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By contrast, it is not clear that “speech act theory” has comparable credentials. One such credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there be. To that end I close with a brief discussion of the possibility, envisioned by some, of an “illocutionary logic”.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Construed as a bit of observable behavior, a given act may be done with any of a variety of aims. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, a given utterance, such as ‘You'll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of what those words mean. However, given the dizzying array of uses of ‘meaning’ in philosophy and related cognitive sciences, I will here refer instead to content. While different theories of content abound (as sets of possible worlds, sets of truth conditions, Fregean senses, ordered n -tuples, to name a few), the phenomenon is relatively clear: What the speaker said is that the addressee will be more punctual in the future. The addressee or observer who asks, “What is the force of those words?” is asking, of that content, how it's to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command. The addressee is not asking for a further elucidation of that content.

Or so it seems. Perhaps whether the utterance is meant as a threat, a prediction or a command will depend on some part of her content that was left unpronounced? According to this suggestion, really what she said was, “I predict you'll be more punctual,” or “I command you to be more punctual,” as the case may be. Were that so, however, she'd be contradicting herself in uttering ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ as a prediction while going on to point out, ‘I don't mean that as a prediction.’ While such a juxtaposition of utterances is surely odd, it is not a self-contradiction, any more than “It's raining but I don't believe it,” is a self-contradiction when the left conjunct is put forth as an expression of belief. What is more, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual,’ is itself a sentence with a content, and will be being put forth with some force or other when–as per our current suggestion—the speaker says it in the course of making a prediction. So that sentence, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual’ is put forth with some force–say as an assertion. This implies, according to the present suggestion, that really the speaker said, ‘I assert that I predict that you'll be more punctual.’ Continuing this same style of reasoning will enable us to infer that performance of a single speech act requires saying–though perhaps not pronouncing—infinitely many things. That is reason for rejecting the hypothesis that implied it, and for the rest of this entry I will assume that force is no part of content.

In chemical parlance, a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of the compound's properties. Analogously, it is often remarked that a proposition is itself communicatively inert; for instance, merely expressing the proposition that snow is white is not to make a move in a “language game”. Rather, such moves are only made by putting forth a proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further plausibility from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This common element is the proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius 1967, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That's why, from the fact that someone has said, “You'll be more punctual in the future,” we cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of speech acts, pragmatics studies, inter alia , their force. The bulk of this entry may be seen as an elucidation of force.

Need we bother with such an elucidation? That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning : Force is a feature not of what is meant but of how it is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 6 below.

Speech acts are not to be confused with acts of speech. One can perform a speech act such as issuing a warning without saying anything: A gesture or even a minatory facial expression will do the trick. So too, one can perform an act of speech, say by uttering words in order to test a microphone, without performing a speech act. [ 3 ] For a first-blush delineation of the range of speech acts, then, consider that in some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I can't lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now Treasurer of the Corporation.” Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.) A necessary and, perhaps, sufficient condition of a type of act's being a speech act is that acts of that type can–whether or not all are—be carried out by saying that one is doing so.

Saying can make it so, but that is not to suggest that any old saying by any speaker constitutes the performance of a speech act. Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, spends considerable effort detailing the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously . Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses . The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake : I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you don't accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of keeping the promise. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for a speech act of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which individual speech acts would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each one. [ 4 ]

Here are three further features of the “saying makes it so” condition. First, the saying appealed to in the “saying makes it so” test is not an act of speech: My singing in the shower, “I promise to meet you tomorrow for lunch,” when my purpose is simply to enjoy the sound of my voice, is not a promise, even if you overhear me. Rather, the saying (or singing) in question must itself be something that I mean. We will return in Section 6 to the task of elucidating the notion of meaning at issue here.

Second, the making relation that this “saying makes it so” condition appeals to needs to be treated with some care. My uttering, “I am causing molecular agitation,” makes it the case that I am causing molecular agitation. Yet causing molecular agitation is not a speech act on any intuitive understanding of that notion. One might propose that the notion of making at issue here marks a constitutive relation rather than a causal relation. That may be so, but as we'll see in Section 5, this suggests the controversial conclusion that all speech acts depend for their existence on conventions over and above those that imbue our words with meaning.

Finally, the saying makes it so condition has a flip side. Not only can I perform a speech act by saying that I am doing so, I can also rescind that act later on by saying (in the speech act sense) that I take it back. I cannot, of course, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or an assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also take it back. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by saying that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of a force such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

1. Illocutionary point : This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are; the characteristic point of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point : Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

3. Mode of achievement : This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.

4. Propositional content conditions : Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control. I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law.

5. Preparatory conditions : These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.

6. Sincerity conditions : Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions : Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting” of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F 1 and F 2 are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, and I cannot convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the reduction of adipose tissue. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight, but some flightless creatures have wings.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do this by noting that one can urge by saying, “I urge you to shut the door,” while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you by saying, “I persuade you to shut the door.” A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act. (1962, p. 107)

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, a speech act can be performed by virtue of the performance of another one. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1975b).

Indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. In asking whether you are intending to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might indeed jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without suggesting anything. Similarly, the advertiser who tells us that Miracle Cream reversed hair loss in Bob, Mike, and Fred, also most likely hopes that I will believe it will reverse my own hair loss. That does not show that he is (indirectly) asserting that it will. Whether he is asserting this depends, it would seem, on whether he can be accused of being a liar if in fact he does not believe that Miracle Cream will staunch my hair loss.

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. My remark that Miracle Cream helped Bob, Mike and Fred is also an assertion that it will help you only if I intend to be so committed. What is more, these intentions must be feasibly discernible on the part of one's audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I have not done so. I need to make that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by virtue of inference to the best explanation. All else being equal, the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so. All else equal, the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is my intention to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope that you do so. Bertolet 1994, however, develops an even more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker's intentional state–hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is explanatorily unmotivated.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature–that process by which we mean more than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation. (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle's 1979b account of indirect speech acts was in terms of conversational implicature. The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this connection in Section 7.

Force is often characterized in terms of the notions of direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction. The first of these may be illustrated with an example derived from Anscombe (1963). A woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to get; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists is the same, yet they differ along another dimension. For the contents of the husband's list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit : It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective's list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband's cart. As such, the detective's list has word-to-world direction of fit : The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying “Thank you,” and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., “Tell me who is at the door!”), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, “Hooray for Arsenal!” Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having “null” direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all. (The characterization is thus analogous to the way in which some non-classical logical theories describe some proposition as being neither True nor False, but as having a third truth value, N : Evidently that is not to say that such propositions are bereft of truth value.) It is difficult to discern from such accounts how one sheds light on a speech act in characterizing it as having a null direction of fit, as opposed to having no direction of fit at all. [ 5 ]

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts seem subject to norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, “How do you know?”, while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture. (Williamson 1996) Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit? This is not to say that the difference between assertion and conjecture cannot be expressed as a difference among Searle and Vanderveken's seven components of illocutionary force; for instance that difference might be thought of as a difference in parameter 2, namely the degree of strength of illocutionary point. Rather, what we are seeking is an account of, rather than a label for, that difference.

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction . This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: It is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction–truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, typically in a speech act, performed by an addressee, such as an assertion that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: An assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, and that may enable us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Section 7.

5. Mood, Force and Convention

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you've used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a question. After all, you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles John is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with contextual clues, intonation and so on to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism . According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of ‘I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,’ to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. J.L. Austin, who introduced the English-speaking world to the study of speech acts, seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of “felicity conditions” for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances… (1962, p. 14).

Austin's student Searle follows him in this, writing

…utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

…the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and …speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Force-conventionalism, even in the weaker form just adumbrated, has been challenged by Strawson, who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one's arms, and say, “I entreat you.” But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions….[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone's speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another's communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it is intended to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as entreating and excommunicating.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

An analogous point would not apply to the act of sending : Just from the facts that I am trying to send my addressee something, and that he recognizes that I am trying to do so (and what it is I am trying to send him), we cannot infer that I have succeeded in sending it to him. However, while Searle's point about telling looks more plausible at first glance than would a point about sending, it also is not accurate. Suppose I am trying to tell somebody that I love her, and that she recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my inability to get past the letter ‘l’. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in avowing my love for her. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won't inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. [ 6 ]

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act–we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, its gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of one or another form of commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? [ 7 ] Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning–a topic to which I now turn.

6. Speaker-Meaning and Force

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of what I mean that I happen to be speaking at the volume that I do. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is part of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, part of what I say–that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be a feature of how I mean what I do.

Let us elucidate this notion of speaker meaning (née non-natural meaning). In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two senses of ‘mean’. One sense is exemplified by remarks such as ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ and ‘Those spots mean measles.’ The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs ‘natural meaning’. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this sense of ‘mean’ from another sense of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying “You make a better door than a window”, George meant that you should move,

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there's quicksand over there,

Grice used the term ‘non-natural meaning’ for this sense of ‘mean’, and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term ‘speaker meaning’. [ 8 ] After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall heretofore call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might leave Smith's handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone's beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John's severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod's action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered hunters who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention .

It has, however, been shown that intentions to produce cognitive or other effects on an audience are not necessary for speaker meaning. Davis 1992 offers many cases of speaker meaning in the absence of reflexive communicative intentions. Indeed, he forcefully argues that speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Instead of intentions to produce certain effects in an audience, some authors have proposed that speaker meaning is a matter of overtly indicating some aspect of oneself. (Green, 2007). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it's a lot more plausible that I mean that it's raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P , it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P , and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, “How do you know that?” I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same “liability to error” way; but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P ; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content–where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one's intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

• conjecturing

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move from left to right we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, “How do you know that?”, and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The “educated guess” is intermediate between these two cases.)

We may think of this illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning as characterizing not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, “You're tired,” and my remark, “I'm tired,” as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P , followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P , as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed a bit further in Section 9 under the rubric of “mode” of illocutionary commitment.

Speaker meaning, then, applies not just to content but also to force, and we may elucidate that claim with a further articulation of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so—a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle's view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one's intention, or at least one's attempt, to perform that act. What is missing from Searle's characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one's heart (or mind) on one's sleeve.

7. Force, Norms, and Conversation

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have brought speech acts into their conversational context. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that–not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, it might reasonably be held that a speech act's ecological niche is nevertheless the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove it from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may leave us blind to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill's, A System of Logic , suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word's meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of so-called conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. [ 11 ] For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. More recently, Asher and Lascardes 2003 have defended a more systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that responds to Searle's challenge.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from certain traditions flowing from work in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974) Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the evolution of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of propositions (construed as the conversational “common ground”) that can be presupposed by interlocutors. (Such propositions may, but need not be, understood as sets of possible worlds.) Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, addressee, and so forth. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as “conversational score”.

“Scorekeeping” approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a proposition: If that “assertion” is accepted, then the score is updated accordingly. Little attention is paid to the question whether that proposition is put forth as a conjecture, guess, assertion, or supposition for the sake of argument. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would do just this. Accordingly Green 1999 attempts a synthesis of some aspects of this scorekeeping model, Gricean pragmatics, and concepts pertaining to speech acts.

Frege's Begriffschrift constitutes history's first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system. However, Frege did not see his Begriffschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from proposition already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator : an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth. (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege's idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson, however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise, arguing that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one's speech act, the only interest in a force indicator would be if it could guarantee the force of one's speech act. But nothing could: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of her performance:

It is easy to see that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion; every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Dummett 1993 and Hare 1989 reply to Davidson. Hare in particular remarks that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to the issue of illocutionary acts, which, as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P (though perhaps a convention could make it the case that people say I believe that P ), so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one's performing a speech act: Such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, ‘as is the case’ can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: ‘If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Greenland will melt.’ Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is committed to the content of the antecedent. If that claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the speech act rather than the proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among propositions. Since particulars cannot stand in inferential relations to one another, no such relations could obtain between individual speech acts. However, just as two events E 1 and E 2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S 1 and S 2 could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment . According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S 1 commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S 2 iff it is not possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 . Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S 1 is identical with <IP 1 , Str " , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 > (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S 2 is identical with <IP 1 , Str $ , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 >. Suppose further that Str " and Str $ differ only in that " is stronger than $. Then it will not be possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 ; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 implies a speech act S n .)

Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can also commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R , then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R . That is not to say that I have also asserted R : If assertion were closed under deduction I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q , then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q . For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q .

To explicate this relation, Searle and Vanderveken define weak illocutionary commitment: S 1 weakly illocutionarily implies S 2 iff every performance of S 1 commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S 2 (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q , and an agent asserts P , then she is committed to believing that Q . These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q . In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q ) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q .

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Let S be an arbitrary speaker, < ⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

<⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > is illocutionarily valid iff if speaker S is committed to each A i under mode ⊢ i , then S is committed to B under mode ⊢. [ 12 ]

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken's definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S 1 , …, S n -1 , which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act S n . Evidently such a “strict liability” conception still requires that one performs S n only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 ; it is difficult to see how one can perform S n while having no intention of performing a speech act at all.

We have also made progress on a question raised in Section 1, namely whether “speech act theory” deserves its name. An appropriate definition of illocutions would enable us to explain, rather than merely describe, some features of speech acts. Vanderveken 1990 offers a set of tableaux depicting inferential relations among speech acts. For instance, the following is a fragment of his tableaux for assertives–speech acts whose illocutionary point is to describe how things are:

castigate  reprimand  accuse  blame  criticize  assert  suggest

where strong illocutionary validity moves from left to right. This is because all these speech acts have the illocutionary point of describing how things are, but the propositional content conditions and degree of strength of illocutionary point conditions become increasingly less stringent as we move from left to right. Accounts of this sort offer hope of our being able informatively answer such questions whether someone who castigates an addressee for some state of affairs is also assertorically committed to the obtaining of that state of affairs. Might we discover “illocutionary tautologies”, “illocutionary absurdities” and other phenomena that could shed light on such utterances as “This very utterance is an assertion”, “I doubt this very claim”? Affirmative answers to such questions will be needed if we are to justify our use of “speech act theory”.

Bibliography

• Alston, W. (2000) Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––. 1994: ‘Illocutionary Acts and Linguistic Meaning,’ in Tsohatzidis (ed.), pp. 29-49.
• Anscombe, G.E.M. (1963) Intention, 2 nd Edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Armstrong, D. (1971) ‘Meaning and communication’. The Philosophical Review 80 : 427-47.
• Asher, N. and A. Lascarides 2003: Logics of Conversation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Austin, J.L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words , 2 nd Edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisá. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––. (1970) Philosophical Papers , Edited by J. Urmson, and G. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Avramides, A. (1989) Meaning and Mind: An Examination of the Gricean Account of Language . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bach, K. 1975: ‘Performatives are statements too’, Philosophical Studies 28 : 229-36.
• –––. 1994: ‘Conversational impliciture,’ Mind and Language 9 : 124-162.
• –––, and R. Harnish (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
• Barker, S. (2004). Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Belnap, N., T. Steel, 1976: The Logic of Questions and Answers. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Bennett, J. (1976) Linguistic Behaviour . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bertolet, R. 1994: ‘Are There Indirect Speech Acts?’ in in S. Tsohatzidis (ed.) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (London: Routledge), pp. 335-49.
• Brandom, R. (1983). ‘Asserting.’ Noûs 17: 637-650.
• Brandom, R (1994) Making It Explicit , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Carston, R. (2003) Thoughts and Utterances . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Clark, H. (1996) Using Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cohen, ‘Do Illocutionary Forces Exist?’ The Philosophical Quarterly 14 : 18-137.
• Davidson, D. (1979) ‘Moods and Performances’. Reprinted in Davidson (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation . (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Davis, W. 1992: ‘Speaker meaning,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 15 : 223-53.
• –––. (2003) Meaning, Expression and Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dummett, M.A.E. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth.
• –––. (1993) ‘Mood, force and convention,’ in his The Seas of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 202-23.
• Forguson, L.W. 1973. “Locutionary and illocutionary acts”. In G. Warnock (ed), Essays on J. L. Austin . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 160–185.
• Dummett, M. 1993: “Mood, Force and Convention”, in his The Seas of Language (Oxford), pp. 202-23.
• Frege, G. [1879] 1976: Begriffsschrift in van Heijenoort (ed.) From Frege to Gödel: A Sourcebook in Mathematical Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-82.
• Frege, G. (1884) The Foundations of Arithmentic , trans. J.L. Austen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• –––. (1979) Posthumous Writings H. Hermes, F. Kambartel and F. Kaulbach (eds.) (Blackwell).
• –––. (1980) Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence , G. Gabriel, et al eds. (Chicago).
• –––. (1984) ‘The thought: A logical inquiry.’ Collected Papers on Mathematics Logic and Philosophy . Edited by B. McGuinness, trans. by M. Black et al . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Frye, M. 1976. “On saying”. American Philosophical Quarterly 13: 123–127.
• –––. 1973: ‘Force and meaning,’ Journal of Philosophy 70 : 281-94.
• Geach, P. (1972) ‘Assertion.’ Reprinted in his Logic Matters , Oxford: Blackwell: pp. 254-269.
• Gorman, D. (1999) The Use and Abuse of Speech-act Theory in Criticism. Poetics Today 20 : 93-119.
• Ginet, C. (1979) ‘Performativity’. Linguistics and Philosophy 3 : 245-65.
• Green, M. (1997) ‘On the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning’. Mind , 106 : 217-244.
• –––. (1999) ‘Illocutions, Implicata, and What a Conversation Requires’. Pragmatics & Cognition 7 : 65-92.
• –––. (2000) ‘Illocutionary Force and Semantic Content’. Linguistics and Philosophy 23 : 435-473.
• –––. (2002) ‘The Inferential Significance of Frege's Assertion Sign’. Facta Philosophica , 4 : 201-29.
• –––. (2007). Self-Expression . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Grice, H.P. (1957) “Meaning”, The Philosophical Review 66, No. 3: 377-88.
• ––– (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Hajdin, M. (1991) ‘Is There More to Speech Acts Than Illocutionary Force and Propositional Content?’ Nous, 25 : 353-7.
• Hamblin, C.L. (1987) Imperatives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Hare, R. (1970) ‘Meaning and Speech Acts’. The Philosophical Review , 79 , pp. 3-24.
• –––. (1989) ‘Some Subatomic Particles of Logic’, Mind , 98 , pp. 23-37.
• Harrah, D. (1980) ‘On speech acts and their logic,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 : 204-11.
• –––. (1994) ‘On the vectoring of speech acts,’ in S. Tsohatzidis (ed.) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (London: Routledge), pp. 374-392.
• Holdcroft, D. (1994): ‘Indirect Speech Acts and Propositional Content,’ in S. Tsohatzidis (ed.) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (London: Routledge), pp. 350-64.
• Humberstone, L. (1992) ‘Direction of fit’. Mind 101: 59–83.
• Kearns, J. (1997) ‘Propositional Logic of Supposition and Assertion’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 : 325–349.
• –––. (1999) ‘An Illocutionary Logical Explanation of the Surprise Execution’, History and Philosophy of Logic 20 : 195-214.
• –––. (2006) ‘Conditional Assertion, Denial, and Supposition as Illocutionary Acts,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 29 : 455-85.
• Lewis, D. (1979) ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8, pp. 339-59. Reprinted in Lewis 1983.
• Lewis, D. (1980) ‘Index, Context, and Content’. In Stig Kanger and Sven Ohman (Eds.), Philosophy and Grammar . Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in David Lewis, 1998, Papers in Philosophical Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lewis, D. (1983) Philosophical Papers Volume I . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McDowell, J. (1980) ‘Meaning, communication, and knowledge.’ Reprinted in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Meggle, G. (1985) ‘To hell with speech act theory,’ in M. Dascal (ed.) Dialogue (Benjamins): 205-11.
• Mulligan, K. (ed) (1987) Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology . Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof.
• Parret, H. and J. Verschueren (eds.) (1991) (On) Searle on Conversation . Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
• Pendlebury, M. (1986) ‘Against the power of force: reflections on the meaning of mood,’ Mind 95 : 361-372.
• Recanati, F. (1987) Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Reichenbach, H. (1947): Elements of Symbolic Logic . New York: Macmillan.
• Reinach, A. (1913) ‘Die apriorischen Grunglagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes,’ Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 2 : 685-847.
• Sbisa, M. (1995) ‘Speech act theory,’ in J. Verschueren, J. Östman, and J. Blommaert (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics . John Benjamins, 495-506.
• Schiffer, S. (1972) Meaning . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Schuhmann, K. and Smith, B. 1990. ‘Elements of speech act theory in the philosophy of Thomas Reid,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 7 : 47–66.
• Searle, J. (1968) ‘Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts’. The Philosophical Review 77 : 405–424.
• –––. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––. (1975a) ‘A taxonomy of illocutionary acts’. In K. Gunderson (ed), Language, Mind and Knowledge . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.
• –––. (1975b) ‘Indirect speech acts’. In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts , ed. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, pp. 59–82. New York: Academic Press.
• –––. (1979) ‘Indirect Speech Acts,’ in his Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––. (1986a). ‘Meaning, communication, and representation’. In R. Grandy and R. Warner (eds), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 209–226.
• –––. (1986b) ‘Notes on conversation’. In D.G. Ellis and W. A. Donohue (eds), Contemporary Issues in Language and Discourse Processes . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 7–19.
• –––. (1989) ‘How performatives work’. Linguistics and Philosophy 12 : 535–558.
• –––. (1992) ‘Conversation’. In H. Parrett and J. Verschueren (eds.) (On) Searle on Conversation . New York: Benjamins, 7-30.
• –––. (1999) Mind, Language, and Society: Doing Philosophy in the Real World . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• –––. ,and D. Vanderveken (1985) Foundations of Illocutionary Logic . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Smith, B. (1990) ‘Toward a history of speech act theory’. In A. Burkhardt (ed), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions: Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John Searle . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 29–61.
• –––. (ed). 2003. John Searle . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stalnaker, R. (1972) ‘Pragmatics’. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language . Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 380-397.
• –––. (1973) ‘Presuppositions’. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2: 447-457.
• –––. (1974) ‘Pragmatic Presuppositions’. In M. Munitz and P. Unger (eds.) Semantics and Philosophy . New York: NYU Press, 197-213.
• –––. (1984) Inquiry . Cambridge, MA: MIT.
• Stenius, E. (1967) ‘Mood and language-game’, Synthese 17 : 254-274.
• Strawson, P. (1950). ‘On referring’. Mind 59: 320-44.
• –––(1964) ‘Intention and convention in speech acts’, The Philosophical Review 73 : 439-60, reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers . London: Methuen, 1971.
• –––. (1970) Meaning and truth. Reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers . London: Methuen 1971.
• –––. (1973) ‘Austin and ‘locutionary meaning’’. In G.Warnock (ed), Essays on J. L. Austin , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 46–68.
• Thomason, R. (1990) ‘Accommodation, meaning and implicature: interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics’. In Cohen, Morgan and Pollock (eds.), Intentions in Communication . Cambridge, MA: MIT. 325-364.
• Tsohatzidis, S.L. (ed.) (1994) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (Routledge)
• Vanderveken, D. (1990). Meaning and Speech Acts, Vols I and II (Cambridge).
• Vendler, Z. 1972: Res Cogitans (Cornell).
• Watson, G. 2004: ‘Asserting and Promising,’ Philosophical Studies 117 : 57-77
• Williamson, T. (1996). ‘Knowing and asserting.’ The Philosophical Review 105: 489-523.
• Dummett, M. Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard).
• Furberg, M. 1971. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J. L. Austin's Philosophy . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Grewendorf, G. and G. Meggle (eds.) 2002: Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality (Dordrecht: Kluwer).
• Holdcroft, D. 1978. Words and Deeds: Problems in the Theory of Speech Acts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Lepore, E. and van Gulick, R. (eds). 1991. John Searle and his Critics . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Warnock, G. Ed. 1973: Essays on J. L. Austin . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Warnock, G. 1989: J. L. Austin . New York: Routledge.
• Research project in the philosophy of language , maintained at the University of Berne, Switzerland. This site is devoted to some main themes of research stemming from Grices' work on speaker meaning and implicature.
• Working Papers in Lingustics , University College London.
• ‘ Toward a history of speech act theory ’, a paper by Barry Smith (SUNY/Buffalo).

anaphora | assertion | Frege, Gottlob | Grice, Paul | implicature | -->meaning, theories of --> | pragmatics | -->presupposition --> | propositional attitude reports | propositions | vagueness

Speech Acts in Linguistics

Brooks Kraft LLC/Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In linguistics , a speech act is an utterance defined in terms of a speaker's intention and the effect it has on a listener. Essentially, it is the action that the speaker hopes to provoke in his or her audience. Speech acts might be requests, warnings, promises, apologies, greetings, or any number of declarations. As you might imagine, speech acts are an important part of communication.

Speech-Act Theory

Speech-act theory is a subfield of pragmatics . This area of study is concerned with the ways in which words  can be used not only to present information but also to carry out actions. It is used in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, legal and literary theories, and even the development of artificial intelligence.

Speech-act theory was introduced in 1975 by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin in "How to Do Things With Words"   and further developed by American philosopher J.R. Searle. It considers three levels or components of utterances: locutionary acts (the making of a meaningful statement, saying something that a hearer understands), illocutionary acts (saying something with a purpose, such as to inform), and perlocutionary acts (saying something that causes someone to act). Illocutionary speech acts can also be broken down into different families, grouped together by their intent of usage.

Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts

To determine which way a speech act is to be interpreted, one must first determine the type of act being performed.  Locutionary acts  are, according to Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay's "Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics," "the mere act of producing some linguistic sounds or marks with a certain meaning and reference." So this is merely an umbrella term, as illocutionary and perlocutionary acts can occur simultaneously when locution of a statement happens.

Illocutionary acts , then, carry a directive for the audience. It might be a promise, an order, an apology, or an expression of thanks—or merely an answer to a question, to inform the other person in the conversation. These express a certain attitude and carry with their statements a certain illocutionary force, which can be broken into families. 

Perlocutionary acts , on the other hand, bring about a consequence to the audience. They have an effect on the hearer, in feelings, thoughts, or actions, for example, changing someone's mind. Unlike illocutionary acts, perlocutionary acts can project a sense of fear into the audience.

Take for instance the perlocutionary act of saying, "I will not be your friend." Here, the impending loss of friendship is an illocutionary act, while the effect of frightening the friend into compliance is a perlocutionary act.

Families of Speech Acts

As mentioned, illocutionary acts can be categorized into common families of speech acts. These define the supposed intent of the speaker. Austin again uses "How to Do Things With Words" to argue his case for the five most common classes: 

• Verdictives, which present a finding
• Exercitives, which exemplify power or influence
• Commissives, which consist of promising or committing to doing something
• Behabitives, which have to do with social behaviors and attitudes like apologizing and congratulating
• Expositives, which explain how our language interacts with itself

David Crystal, too, argues for these categories in "Dictionary of Linguistics." He lists several proposed categories, including " directives (speakers try to get their listeners to do something, e.g. begging, commanding, requesting), commissives (speakers commit themselves to a future course of action, e.g. promising, guaranteeing), expressives (speakers express their feelings, e.g. apologizing, welcoming, sympathizing), declarations (the speaker's utterance brings about a new external situation, e.g. christening, marrying, resigning)."

It is important to note that these are not the only categories of speech acts, and they are not perfect nor exclusive. Kirsten Malmkjaer points out in "Speech-Act Theory," "There are many marginal cases, and many instances of overlap, and a very large body of research exists as a result of people's efforts to arrive at more precise classifications."

Still, these five commonly accepted categories do a good job of describing the breadth of human expression, at least when it comes to illocutionary acts in speech theory.

Austin, J.L. "How to Do Things With Words." 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Crystal, D. "Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics." 6th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

Malmkjaer, K. "Speech -Act Theory." In "The Linguistics Encyclopedia," 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010.

Nuccetelli, Susana (Editor). "Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics." Gary Seay (Series Editor), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, December 24, 2007.

• Illocutionary Act
• Locutionary Act Definition in Speech-Act Theory
• Speech Act Theory
• Perlocutionary Act Speech
• Illocutionary Force in Speech Theory
• Performative Verbs
• Appropriateness in Communication
• Information Content (Language)
• Felicity Conditions: Definition and Examples
• The Power of Indirectness in Speaking and Writing
• Politeness Strategies in English Grammar
• Mental-State Verbs
• The Definition and Examples of Folk Linguistics
• Pause (Speech and Writing)
• Context in Language
• What "Literal Meaning" Really Means

Basic Tools: Elements of a Theory of Speech Acts

• First Online: 01 September 2021

Cite this chapter

• Marco Ruffino 10  

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 443))

145 Accesses

In this chapter, I explain the basics of speech act theory in the version that best suits our purpose, i.e., in Searle and Vanderveken ( Foundations of illocutionary logic . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985) formulation. I also explain with illustrations the notion of declarative illocutionary acts, by means of which we can generate institutional facts by means of illocutions. I also discuss the notion of illocutionary commitment and illocutionary consistency and argue that they provide a promising tool to deal with Kripke’s cases of contingent a priori truths. This chapter is meant as a theoretical tool that will be applied in Chap. 10 .

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

This is not to deny that there are other approaches with alternative taxonomies, e.g., the one more recently presented in Roberts ( 2018 ). For a survey of alternative approaches and taxonomies to the one here favored, see Green ( 2017 ).

Talking about a “composition” here does not mean that these two acts are produced separately and then combined; on the contrary, Austin conceives locutionary and illocutionary as occurring originally combined in an illocutionary act, and the locutionary act is conceivable only as an abstraction from the latter.

“There are not, as Wittgenstein (on one possible interpretation) and many others have claimed, an infinite or indefinite number of language games or uses of language. Rather, the illusion of limitless uses of language is engendered by an enormous unclarity about what constitutes the criteria for delimiting one language game or use of language from another. If we adopt illocutionary point as the basic notion on which to classify uses of language, then there are a rather limited number of basic things we do with language: we tell people how things are, we try to get them to do things, we commit ourselves to doing things, we express our feelings and attitudes, and we bring about changes through our utterances.” ( 1979a , p. 29)

Actually, Searle’s view on the basic elements changes over time. There are four elements in Searle ( 1969 ), twelve in Searle ( 1979a ) (though many of them do not have a clear relevance in the determination of different forces), and seven in Searle and Vanderveken ( 1985 ). The latter work has a fuller formal development.

As Searle and Vanderveken remark ( 1985 , p. 16), sometimes the mode of achievement and the strength of the illocutionary point are interdependent, e.g., an order (issued by invoking the speaker’s authority) has a stronger degree of strength of the illocutionary point (getting the interlocutor to do something) than requesting.

Searle ( 1979a ) notices that it would be desirable to build a taxonomy solely in terms of the direction of fit, but sees no way of doing this. That is to say, his taxonomy needs to use the other dimensions in order to do justice to the variety of illocutionary acts. For an attempt to build an alternative taxonomy based only on the direction of fit, see Roberts ( 2018 ).

For the peculiarities of assertions within mathematics, see Ruffino et al. ( 2020 ).

We characterize the illocutionary point as taking responsibility for a future action instead of performing a future action because there might be unfulfilled promises that are, nevertheless, promises.

Many such acts correspond to what Austin called “behabitive”, i.e., they express an appreciation in view of other people’s (or the speaker’s own) actions.

In Searle’s original formulation ( 1979a ) there is no sincerity conditions, but in ( 1985 ) Searle and Vanderveken recognize that some declarative acts might require a psychological state such as, e.g., belief.

Vanderveken ( 1990a , p. 140).

“In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it. It needs argument no more than that ‘damn’ is not true or false: it may be that the utterance ‘serves to inform you’—but that is quite different. To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) ‘I name, etc.’. When I say, before the registrar or altar, etc., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging on it.[…]I propose to call it performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, ‘a performative’.[…] The name is derived, of course, from ‘perform’, the usual verb with the noun ‘action’: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something.”( 1962 , pp. 6–7) Though many people agree with Austin that performative utterances are actions denoted by the corresponding verbs, fewer agree that such utterances are neither true nor false.

E.g., in most (but not all) cases, the verb is in the first person, present tense and indicative mood. E.g., ‘I promise…’ is performative, but ‘He promises…’ is not; ‘I promised…’ is a report, but not a performative; similarly with ‘Do I promise…?’. Most performative utterances admit the accretion of ‘hereby’ without changing their intuitive meaning. E.g.,

remains unchanged in meaning in

The same does not happen with

The former might be true, while the latter is plainly false.

As said before, the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary act is, for Austin, also artificial and made only for theoretical purposes since, in a speech situation, a locutionary act only occurs as part or aspect of an illocutionary act.

This claim inspired what would be later called the Performative Hypothesis (or Performative Deletion Analysis ), i.e., the hypothesis that any utterance of a sentence in ordinary communication has a performative verb in its deep structure that is not necessarily evident in the surface structure (e.g., Ross, 1970 , and Sadock, 1974 ). The Hypothesis was severely criticized both by philosophers (e.g., Searle, 1979b ) and linguists (e.g., Levinson, 1983 ) based on overwhelming empirical counterevidence.

For a critical view of the latter taxonomy, and a study of its roots in Austin’s, see Sadock ( 2002 ).

This binomial here is not to be confounded with the descriptivist/anti-descriptivist theories of reference of singular terms, which label something quite different.

Austin includes yet another category of “infelicities” which he calls abuses , i.e., those cases in which some appropriate psychological state is missing like, e.g., a promise without the intention of fulfilling it (p. 18).

E.g., Hartnack ( 1963 ), Black ( 1963 ), Harris ( 1978 ), Taylor and Wolf ( 1981 ), Recanati ( 1987 ), Jary ( 2007 ).

The list of defenders of the descriptivist interpretation also include Kempson ( 1975 ), Edmondson ( 1979 , 1983 ), Leech ( 1976 ), Spielmann ( 1980 ) and Wiggins ( 1971 ).

In the first situation, it is defective because S could only apologize to another person, but not to an object. In the second situation, it is presumably defective because, strictly speaking, S ’s apology only makes sense regarding S ’s own actions, but not someone else’s actions.

Harris describes the situation in the following way:

There is no way out of this dilemma for the descriptivist: his interpretation automatically commits him to one or other of two self-defeating explanations of how to assign a truth value to what S says. No parallel problem in such cases emerges for the non-descriptivist, for the simple reason that for him the question of whether a performative utterance is true or false does not arise. ( 1978 , p. 310)

Harris’ dilemma gave rise to an interesting discussion (mainly among linguists) concerning the prospects of the descriptivist interpretation. Edmondson ( 1979 , 1983 ) seeks to escape the dilemma (and, hence, to save descriptivism) by introducing a distinction between the semantics and the pragmatics of performatives, i.e., on some occasions (like those illustrating Harris’ dilemma) a statement like ‘I apologize’ might be true, although pragmatically the act of apologizing was not successful. So, meaning and truth of performative utterances are, in his view, independent from success in achieving the illocutionary point. Wachtel ( 1980 ) goes in the same direction by distinguishing the “going through the motions of performing a speech act” (which gives the semantic content of a performative utterance and its truth-conditions) from the satisfaction of its felicity conditions (which is neither contained nor implied by “going through the motions of performing a speech act”). Taylor and Wolf ( 1981 ) complained that Edmondson’s (and, by extension, also Wachtel’s) attempt to escape the dilemma makes the descriptivist’s position even worse because it relies on the assumption that one might correctly describe an illocutionary act as ‘he ϕ ed’ even though the felicity conditions of ϕ ing are not fulfilled (and, hence, the act was not carried on). Finally, Rajagopalan ( 1984 ) sees both positions as compatible insofar as they talk about distinct aspects of an illocutionary act: the semantic aspect (descriptive interpretation) and the act itself (anti-descriptive interpretation).

Declarative acts are such that

We thus achieve the world-to-word direction of fit, but we achieve that direction of fit by way of representing the world as having been changed, that is, by way of word-to-world direction of fit. (Searle, 2008 , p. 451)

Recanati ( 1987 ) has a similar account, but with some differences. He divides performatives into three big classes: directives, commissives and declarations. The main feature of directives and commissives is that bringing about the state of affairs represented in the propositional content is intended to be the responsibility of the speaker and hearer, respectively, while in the case of a declaration, bringing about this state of affairs is meant to be nobody’s responsibility, but simply an immediate consequence of the declaration itself.

E.g., Hedenius ( 1963 ), Lewis ( 1970 ), Bach and Harnish ( 1979 ), Ginet ( 1979 ) and García-Carpintero ( 2013 ).

Pagin ( 2004 ) and Jary ( 2007 ) follow Searle in this criticism.

Of course my declaration will be unsuccessful (despite the flat-earthers’ unshakable faith), but the fact is that a declaration comes into existence by the use of a performative.

Although many people see the latter fact as extraordinary because it involves abstract entities (numbers and operations). I mean here by ‘ordinary’ facts that exist independently of a linguistic act.

In Searle ( 2009 ) he presses the point and formulates what he describes as a “very strong theoretical claim”:

The claim that I will be expounding and defending in this book is that all of human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same form as) S[tatus] F[unction] Declarations, including the cases that are not speech acts in the explicit form of Declarations. (p. 13)

Sometimes Searle talks of institutions instead of institutional facts as a “system of constitutive rules, and such a system automatically creates the possibility of institutional facts” ( 2009 , p. 10). But the difference between institutions (such as universities) and institutional facts (such as academic degrees) seems to be just a matter of complexity: institutions are complex institutional facts that can be explored to generate, in a systematic way, new institutional facts. As I interpret him, they are, at the bottom, the same kind of entity.

See Vanderveken (1990, p. 29, 152).

In the less known work of Adolf Reinach ( 1913 ), from the beginning of the twentieth century on the foundations of the civil law, we find passages like the following that seem to anticipate, in some ways, the idea that the performance of one illocutionary act may, as a matter of necessity, give rise to the existence (actual or just potential) of other illocutionary acts:

There is no doubt that the causal relation is no necessary “relation of ideas.” But it would be a mistake to extend this principle to every relationship obtaining between temporally existing things. The case which is now before us is the best proof of this. A “cause” which can generate claim and obligation is the act of promising. From this act, as we shall show more exactly, proceed claim and obligation; we can bring this to evidence when we consider clearly what a promise is, and achieve the intuition ( erschauen ) that it lies in the essence of such an act to generate claim and obligation under certain conditions. And so it is by no means experience in the sense of observation ( Erfahrung ) which instructs us, not even indirectly, about the existential connection of these legal entities; we have rather to do here with a self-evident and necessary relation of essence. ( 1913 , p. 15)

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). On brute facts. Analysis, 18 (3), 69–72.

Article   Google Scholar  

Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Google Scholar  

Bach, K., & Harnish, R. (1979). Linguistic communication and speech acts . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Black, M. (1963). Austin on performatives. Philosophy, 38 (145), 217–226.

Edmondson, W. (1979). Harris on performatives. Journal of Linguistics, 17 (2), 331–334.

Edmondson, W. (1983). The descriptivist and performatives (again). Journal of Linguistics, 19 (1), 183–185.

García-Carpintero, M. (2013). Explicit Performatives revisited. Journal of Pragmatics, 49 (1), 1–17.

Ginet, C. (1979). Performativity. Linguistics and Philosophy, 3 (2), 245–265.

Green, M. (2017). Speech acts. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2017. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Harris, R. (1978). The descriptive interpretation of performative utterances. Journal of Linguistics, 14 (2), 309–310.

Hartnack, J. (1963). The performatory use of sentences. Theoria, 29 (2), 137–146.

Hedenius, I. (1963). Performatives 1. Theoria, 29 (2), 115–136.

Jary, M. (2007). Are explicit performatives assertions? Linguistics and Philosophy, 30 (2), 207–234.

Kempson, R. (1975). Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech, G. (1976). Metalanguage, pragmatics and performatives. In C. Rameh (Ed.), Semantics: Theory and application (pp. 81–98). Georgetown University Press.

Lemmon, E. (1962). On sentences verifiable by their use. Analysis, 22 (4), 86–89.

Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, New York.

Book   Google Scholar  

Lewis, D. (1970). General semantics. Synthese, 22 (1/2), 18–67.

Pagin, P. (2004). Is assertion social? Journal of Pragmatics, 36 (5), 833–859.

Rajagopalan, K. (1984). The Harris–Edmondson dispute: Identifying the strawmen. Journal of Linguistics, 20 (2), 251–256.

Recanati, F. (1987). Meaning and force: The pragmatics of performative utterances . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reinach, A. (1913). Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes . Reprinted and translated by Crosby, J. as “The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law”, Aletheia, III , 1983, pp. 2–142.

Roberts, C. (2018). Speech acts in discourse context. In D. Fogal, D. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New work in speech acts (pp. 317–359). New York: Oxford University Press.

Ross, J. (1970). On declarative sentences. Readings in English Transformational Grammar, 222 , 272.

Ruffino, M., Venturi, G., & San Mauro, L. (2020). Speech acts in mathematics. Synthese , 198, 10063-10087.

Sadock, J. (1974). Toward a linguistic theory of speech acts . Academic Press.

Sadock, J. (2002). Toward a grammatically realistic typology of speech acts. In S. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Foundations of speech act theory (pp. 401–414). Routledge.

Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (1979a). A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In J. Searle (Ed.), Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts (pp. 1–29). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Searle, J. (1979b). Speech acts and recent linguistics. In J. Searle (Ed.), Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts (pp. 162–180). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (1985). Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (1989). How performatives work. Linguistics and Philosophy, 12 (5), 535–558.

Searle, J. (1995). The construction of the social world . New York: The Free Press.

Searle, J. (2008). Language and social ontology. Theory and Society, 37 (5), 443–459.

Searle, J. (2009). Making the social world . New York: Oxford University Press.

Searle, J., & Vanderveken, D. (1985). Foundations of illocutionary logic . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spielmann, R. (1980). Performative utterances as indexical expressions. Comment on Harris. Journal of Linguistics, 16 (1), 89–93.

Taylor, T., & Wolf, G. (1981). Performatives and the descriptivist’s dilemmas. Journal of Linguistics, 17 (2), 329–332.

Vanderveken, D. (1990a). Meaning and speech acts, Volume 1: Principles of language use (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vanderveken, D. (1990b). Meaning and speech acts, Volume 2: Formal semantics of success and satisfaction (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wachtel, T. (1980). Going through the motions. Journal of Linguistics, 16 (1), 85–88.

Wiggins, D. (1971). A reply to Mr. Alston. In D. Steinberg & L. Jakobovits (Eds.), Semantics. An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology (pp. 48–52). London: Cambridge University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Philosophy, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, S˜ão Paulo, Brazil

Marco Ruffino

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Ruffino, M. (2022). Basic Tools: Elements of a Theory of Speech Acts. In: Contingent A Priori Truths. Synthese Library, vol 443. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86622-8_9

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86622-8_9

Published : 01 September 2021

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-86621-1

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-86622-8

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Skip to Content
• Skip to Main Navigation
• Skip to Search

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington IU Bloomington

• My Research
• Books/Edited Volumes
• Reviews of My Books
• 500 Years Later
• UNAM/IU, May 17-18
• My Teaching
• Service Encounters
• Implicature
• Invitations
• Disinvitations
• Compliments
• Politeness 1
• Politeness 2
• Impoliteness
• North America
• Central America
• South America
• Voces Hispanas
• Refusals (Eng)
• Refusals (Span)
• Compliments (Span)
• Capítulo 10
• Recursos para instructores
• Respuestas de los ejercicios del libro
• Actos de habla
• Encuentros de servicio

Pragmatics & Discourse at IU

Speech acts.

Although the idea that language is used to express social action was initially conceptualized in Plato’s Cratylus (1875), our current understanding of language, speech act theory and communicative action, dates back to modern philosophical thinking (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Wittgenstein, 1953/1957). These philosophers stated that the function of language is to perform speech acts or actions (or Wittgenstein’s concept of “language-games”), such as describing or reporting the weather, requesting a letter of recommendation from a professor, apologizing for arriving late, or complaining to our boss about an unfair work load. This view of language rejected the ideas of logical positivism of the 1930s that believed that the main function of language was to describe true or false statements. However, it was in the mid-1950’s that philosophical thinking brought speech act theory to life with the seminal work on speech acts by J. L. Austin and John Searle, two language philosophers who were concerned with meaning, use, and action. Speech acts represent a key concept in the field of pragmatics which can be broadly defined as language use in context taking into account the speaker’s and the addressee’s verbal and non-verbal contributions to the negotiation of meaning in interaction.

Although speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) was not designed to examine stretches of talk in social interaction, it provided the foundation for the analysis of social action. Austin proposed a three-way taxonomy of speech acts: (i) a locutionary act refers to the act of saying something meaningful, that is, the act of uttering a fragment or a sentence in the literal sense (referring and predicating); (ii) an illocutionary act is performed by saying something that has a conventional force such as informing, ordering, warning, complaining, requesting, or refusing; and (iii) a perlocutionary act refers to what we achieve ‘ by  saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading’ (1962: 109 [emphasis in original]).

Austin’s main interest was in utterances used to perform actions with words (e.g. ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’). For these actions to be accomplished, they must be executed under the appropriate conditions: (i) a conventional procedure and effect; (ii) the appropriate circumstances; (iii) the correct and complete execution of the procedure by all persons; and (iv) certain thoughts and feelings about the realization of the act on the part of persons involved [Austin: 1962: 14-15]). The notion of ‘performative action’ is fundamental to the analysis of formal and non-formal institutional interactions because it considers both speaker and hearer co-constructing joint actions in specific sociocultural contexts.

Searle’s (1976) classification of speech acts classified according to the illocutionary point, psychological state, and the direction of fit (word to world or world to word)

Pragmatics & Discourse at IU resources

• César Félix-Brasdefer, Ph.D. - [email protected]

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › Speech Act Theory

Speech Act Theory

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 11, 2020 • ( 0 )

Speech act theory accounts for an act that a speaker performs when pronouncing an utterance, which thus serves a function in communication. Since speech acts are the tools that allow us to interact in real-life situations, uttering a speech act requires knowledge not only of the language but also of its appropriate use within a given culture.

Speech act theory was first developed by J. L. Austin whose seminal Oxford Lectures in 1952–4 marked an important development in the philosophy of language and linguistics. Austin’s proposal can be viewed as a reaction to the extreme claims of logical positivists, who argued that the meaning of a sentence is reducible to its verifiability, that is to an analysis which verifies if utterances are true or false. Austin contended that most of our utterances do more than simply making statements: questions and orders are not used to state something, and many declarative sentences do not lend themselves to being analysed in terms of their falsifiability. Instead, they are instruments that allow speakers to change the state of affairs. This is tantamount to saying that we use language mainly as a tool to do things, and we do so by means of performing hundreds of ordinary verbal actions of different types in daily life, such as make telephone calls, baptise children, or fire an employee.

The fact that not all sentences are a matter of truth verifiability was first advanced by Aristotle who, in his De Interpretatione , argued that:

there are in the mind thoughts which do not involve truth or falsity, and also those which must be either true or false, so it is in speech. [. . .] A sentence is a significant portion of speech [. . .] Yet every sentence is not a proposition; only such are propositions as have in them either truth or falsity. [. . .] Let us therefore dismiss all other types of sentence but the proposition, for this last concerns our present inquiry, whereas the investigation of the others belongs rather to the study of rhetoric or of poetry. (1–4)

Although he explicitly deems the nature of sentences to be uninteresting in his inquiry on apophantic logos, Aristotle represents the first account of language as action.

J. L. Austin/The Times Literary Supplement

Aristotle’s standpoint influenced the study of language for centuries and paved the way for a tradition of research on verifiability, but several German and British philosophers anticipated a view of language as a tool to change a state of affairs. The issues of language and conversation were addressed by Immanuel Kant who anticipated some concepts like ‘context’ and ‘subjective idealisation’, the rules that articulate conversation, and the para-linguistic gestures used in the accomplishment of speech acts. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that a more elaborate treatment of language as action was initiated.

The first, although non-systematic, study of the action-like character of language was conducted by Thomas Reid, who described different acts that can be performed through language, and grouped them into two categories: ‘solitary acts’ like judgements, intentions, deliberations and desiring, which can go unexpressed; and ‘social operations’ like commanding, promising or warning, which, by their very social nature, must be expressed. Reid’s contribution to the inception of a speech act theory can be fully understood if viewed from the wider perspective of the philosophical developments of his time.

Franz Brentano’s distinction between physical and psychological phenomena is particularly relevant in this respect because it reintroduced to philosophy the scholastic concept of‘intentionality’, which allows for a distinction between mental acts and the external world. As far as speech act theory is concerned, suffice it here to say that Brentano argued that every mental, psychological act has a content and is directed at an object (the intentional object), which means that mental phenomena contain an object intentionally within themselves and are thus definable as objectifying acts. The Brentanian approach to intentionality* allows for a distinction between linguistic expressions describing psychological phenomena and linguistic expressions describing non-psychological phenomena. Furthermore, Brentano claimed that speaking is itself an activity through which we can initiate psychic phenomena. Edmund Husserl picked up the importance of what Brentano’s psychological investigation could bring to logic*, in particular the contrast between emotional acts and objectifying acts. Husserl tackled the issue of human mental activities (‘acts’) and how they constitute the ‘object’ of knowledge through experience. In his Logical Investigations (1900/1) he developed a theory of meaning based on ‘intentionality’ which, for him, meant that consciousness entails ‘directedness’ towards an object. It is on the notion of ‘objectifying acts’, that is acts of representation, that Husserl shaped his theory of linguistic meaning, thus emphasising the referential use of language. Collaterally he treated the non-representational uses of language, that is acts like asking questions, commanding or requesting.

Following Brentano and moving within the field of psychology, Anton Marty offered the first account of uses of language meant to direct others’ behaviour, like giving an order, requesting, or giving encouragement. Marty stated that sentences may hint at the speaker’s psychic processes and argued that ‘deliberate speaking is a special kind of acting, whose proper goal is to call forth certain psychic phenomena in other beings’ (1908: 284). Stemming from Brentano’s tripartite subdivision of mental phenomena into presentation, judgements, and phenomena of love and hate, Marty discriminated linguistic forms into names, statements and emotives (utterances arousing an interest), which is a model that closely resembles Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie. It is precisely to Bühler that we owe the coinage of the label ‘speech act theory’. He offered the first thorough study of the functions of language – Darstellung (representation), Kindgabe (intimation or expression), and Auslösung (arousal or appeal) – thus endowing non-representational sentences with their own status.

A more complete treatment we find in the work of Adolf Reinach, who offered the first systematic theory of speech acts. Reinach received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich; his dissertation was on the concept of cause in penal law. It was within the context of legal language that Reinach argued in favour of the relevance of speech acts which he referred to, presumably independently of Reid’s work, as ‘social acts, that is acts of the mind that are performed in the very act of speaking’. Reinach (1913) provided a detailed taxonomy of social acts as performative* utterances and their modification, and stated very clearly that the utterance ( Äusserung ) of a social act is different from the inner experience of emotions like anger or shame and from statements ( Konstatierungen ) about experiences. It is precisely the recourse to the physical medium, the Äusserung , that transforms the philosophical category of action into a social act. Drawing on previous literature, Reinach separated actions from internal experiences. Then he discriminated between external actions like kissing or killing and linguistic actions, and within this class he distinguished between social acts, which are performed in every act of speaking, and actions, where signs are used but no speech act is performed such as in ‘solitary asserting’ and emotive uses of language. The final distinction refers to the linguistic actions performed in uttering performative formulae and the linguistic and nonlinguistic actions whose performance has an effect on the state of affairs and even changes it.

While Reinach’s ideas were spreading through the Munich scholars, at Oxford A. J. Ayer, considered the philosophical successor of Bertrand Russell, deemed philosophically interesting only those sentences that can be subject to the truth-condition analysis. In line with the logical positivism* of the Vienna Circle, Ayer developed the verification principle in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) where he stated that a sentence is meaningful only if it has verifiable import. Sentences expressing judgements, evaluation and the like were not to be objects of scientific inquiry. This stance, which is now known as the ‘descriptive fallacy’, led him into conflict with Oxford linguist philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, who instead were greatly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He claimed that a language consists of a wide multiplicity of structures and usages that logical positivists had neglected to analyse but which encompass the majority of what human beings say in their construction of meaning.

Following Wittgenstein’s insights into language and putting himself against the positivist background, Gilbert Ryle rejected the Cartesian mind-body dualism in The Concept of Mind ( 1949), and revived the centrality of the standard uses of language, thus contributing to the development of ‘ordinary language philosophy’* in Oxford.

Taking the same veil and influenced by Husserl, Austin rejected the account that only sentences that are meant to describe a state of affairs are worth studying, and he observed that verifiable sentences are only a small part of the large amount of utterances produced by language users. Not all utterances express propositions: many perform actions as, for example, greetings or orders, which resist a truth-conditional analysis. Indeed, most of the sentences uttered by speakers are used in such a way as to perform more fundamental things in verbal interactions, such as naming a ship, marrying a couple, or making a request. In daily life we perform many ordinary verbal actions, and utterances are used in speech events to accomplish all that is achieved through language. Austin’s speech act theory was first delineated in the notes he prepared for some lectures interestingly entitled Words and Deeds which he delivered at Oxford University from 1952 to 1954. Such notes constituted the basis on which he developed his Harvard lectures in 1955, posthumously published in 1962. In the first phase of development of his theory, Austin retained the Aristotelian distinction between apophantic and non-apophantic logos, and introduced the terms of constative utterances and performative utterances, where the former describe or constate a state of affairs and the latter perform actions. Austin later realised that a clear distinction between the two types of utterances is unsustainable. If, for example, we say ‘There is a rat under your chair’, we do more than assert a state of affairs: we warn someone about a possible danger. Assertions can thus be used to perform such acts as to warn, to apologise, and many more. Austin then abandoned the dichotomy and contended that to say something equals to perform something.

According to Austin, when we say something, we perform three acts simultaneously: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act. At the locutionary level, a speaker produces sounds (phonetic act) which are well ordered with respect to the phonological system and grammar of a particular language (phatic act), and carry some sense with respect to the semantic and pragmatic rules of that language (rhetic act). At the illocutionary level, he is expressing his intention by virtue of conventions shared in his speech community. At the perlocutionary level, he performs a third act which includes the consequences of his speaking, and he has only limited control over them. In order for the speechact to be successful, it must fulfil some appropriateness conditions, or ‘felicity’ conditions: locution is successful if words and sounds are correctly produced; illocution is appropriate if it meets the conditions for its realisation; perlocution may be effective when it produces consequences desired by the producer. The notion of illocutionary force embodies the philosophical notion of intentionality, which can be expressed by performing a speech act through three modalities: (1) directly or indirectly through the performance of another speech act (‘Pass me the salt’ versus ‘Can you pass me the salt?’); literally or non-literally depending on the way words are used (‘Stick it in your head’); (3) explicitly or inexplicitly when meaning is spelled out fully or incompletely (‘I’ll be back later, Mary’s ready’). Indirectness and nonliterality are disambiguated by way of a conversational implicature*, whereas explicitation is achieved through expansion or completion of what one says.

John Searle, one of Austin’s students, contributed widely to developing speech act theory, which he addressed from the viewpoint of intentionality. Specifically he conceived of linguistic intentionality as derived from mental intentionality. In his Speech Acts (1969) Searle claimed that Austin’s ‘felicity conditions’ are constitutive rules of speech acts to the extent that to perform a speech act means to meet the conventional rules which constitute a specific speech act. Moving from this approach and analysing the act of promising, Searle proposed a classification of speech acts into four categories: (1) propositional content (what the speech act isabout); (2) preparatory condition, which states the prerequisites for the speech act; (3) sincerity condition (the speaker has to sincerely intend to keep a promise); and (4) essential condition (the speaker’s intention that the utterance counts as an act and as such is to be recognised by the hearer). One of Searle’s major contributions to the theory refers to indirectness, that is the mismatch between an utterance and an illocutionary force.

The interpretation of indirect speech acts has drawn a great deal of attention. Drawing on H. P. Grice’s pragmatics, most scholars assume that some inferential work on the part of the hearer is required in order to identify the speaker’s communicative intention and the core question is how such inference can be computed. Searle (1975) assumes that the hearer recognises both a direct-literal force, which he understands as the secondary force, and an indirect-nonliteral force, which is the primary force. Similarly Dan Gordon and George Lakoff (1975) argue that inference rules that they label ‘conversational postulates’ reduce the amount of inferential computing necessary to disambiguate an indirect speech act. Jerrold Sadock (1974) departs from the inferential hypothesis and proposes ‘the idiom model’ by claiming that a speech act like ‘Can you pass me the salt?’ is promptly interpreted as a request and needs no inference.

Speech act theory received great attention and valid theoretical proposals from cognitive linguists. Klaus Panther and Linda Thornburg (1998) claim that our knowledge of illocutionary meaning may be systematically organised in the form of what they call ‘illocutionary scenarios’. They are formed by a before, a core, and an after component. If a person wants someone to bring him his pen, he can utter a direct speech act like ‘Bring me my pen’, which exploits the core component, or he can make his request indirectly exploiting either the before component (‘Can you bring me my pen?’) where the modal verb ‘can’ points to the hearer’s ability to perform the action, or the after component (‘You will bring me my pen, won’t you?’) where the auxiliary ‘will’ instantiates the after component of the request scenario. Panther (2005) makes the point that metonymies provide natural ‘inference schemas’ which are constantly used by speakers in meaning construction and interpretation. Scenarios may be accessed metonymically by invoking relevant parts of them. Indirect requests like ‘Can you open the door?’, ‘Will you close the window?’, ‘Do you have hot chocolate?’ exploit all pre-conditions for the performance of a request, that is, the ability and willingness of the hearer, and his possession of the required object. Such pre-conditions are used to stand for the whole speech act category. By means of the explicit mention of one of the components of the scenario, it is possible for the speaker to afford access to the hearer to the whole illocutionary category of ‘requesting’ in such a way that the utterance is effortlessly interpreted as a request. With a view to improving Panther’s proposal, Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (2007) contends that illocutionary meaning is directly tied to the notion of Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs), which are principle-governed cognitive structures. Illocutionary scenarios represent the way in which language users construct interactional meaning representations abstracted away from a number of stereotypical illocutionary situations. In an indirect request like ‘I fancy going out for dinner’ the hearer understands the implicated meaning by relying on high-level situational ICMs – that is, on the generic knowledge that expressing a wish indirectly corresponds to asking for its fulfillment. Thus, it is exactly the quick and easy retrieval from our long-term memory of a stored illocutionary scenario that allows us to identify the nature of indirectness.

Speech act theory is a thought-provoking issue which has attracted the interest of philosophers of language and linguists from diverse theoretical persuasions. Manifold aspects of the theory are being debated such as the classification of speech acts, the relationship between speech acts and culture, and the acquisition of speech acts by children, which proves how this area of language research still provides room for developments and new insights.

Primary sources Aristotle (1941). De Interpretatione. New York: Random House. 38–61. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon D. and G. Lakoff (1975). ‘Conversational postulates’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 83–106. Husserl, E. (1900/1). Logische Untersuchungen. Halle: Nyemeier.Panther, K. U. and L. Thornburg (1998). ‘A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation’. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 755–69. Panther K. U. (2005). ‘The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction’. In F. Ruiz de Mendoza and S.Peña (eds), Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 353–86. Reinach, A. (1913). ‘Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes’. In Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1: 685–847. Ruiz de Mendoza, F. (2007). ‘High level cognitive models: in search of a unified framework for inferential and grammatical behavior’. In Krzysztof Kosecki (ed.), Perspectives on Metonymy. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 1130. Ryle G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson. Sadock J. (1974). Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. Searle J. R. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle J. R. (1975). ‘Indirect speech acts’. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 59–82. Wittgenstein L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Further reading Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz. Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Leipzig: Duncke and Humbolt. Marty, A. (1908). Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Halle: Nyemeier. Reid, T. (1894). The Works of Thomas Reid. Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart.

Source: Key Ideas in Linguistics and the. Philosophy of Language. Edited by Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge. Edinburgh University Press. 2009.

Share this:

Categories: Literary Terms and Techniques

Tags: Adolf Reinach , Austin's Theory of Speech Act , Äusserung , illocutionary act , J. L. Austin Speech Act Theory , J.L. Austin , John Searle , Konstatierungen , Linguistics , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , locutionary act , Perlocutionary act , Speech act theory , Speech act theory Analysis , Speech act theory Essay , Speech act theory linguistics , Speech act theory notes , What is Speech act theory , Who developed Speech act theory

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous
• Next chapter >

1 Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape

• Published: July 2018
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This introduction is both a capsule history of major work in speech-act theory and an opinionated guide to its current state, organized around five major accounts of what speech acts fundamentally are. We first consider the two classical views, on which a speech act is the kind of act it is mainly due to convention (Austin), or to intention (Grice). We then spell out three other broad approaches, which conceive of speech acts primarily in terms of their function, or as the expression of mental states, or as constituted by norms. With these five families of views laid out, we relate them in turn to the apparatus of conversational score and discourse context; to the project of speech-act taxonomy; and to the theory of force. Last, we review applications of speech-act theory to matters legal and political, and to ethically significant phenomena like silencing, derogation, and coercion.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• Google Scholar Indexing
• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Corrections

J.L. Austin and John Searle on Speech Act Theory

J.L. Austin and John Searle developed Speech Act Theory and argued that our language does not only describe reality but that it can be used to perform acts.

The average number of words we speak on a daily basis remains a contested matter. Some have argued that the average is around 16,000 words, while more modest researchers refer to 5,000. Of course, culture, sample size, and sociodemographic variables influence the answer. One thing is certainly true: the number of spoken words we use is not trivial. And this is without adding the number of text messages, tweets, and other written posts that are part of our habits.

What do we do with these words? Some are historically memorable, like those of US president Ronald Regan during a speech in West Berlin in 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”. Others are kept as literature treasures, like those found in Shakespeare or Gabriel García Márquez . It seems clear that with words we do not only describe the world and refer to things, but we transform reality.  This was the intuition that J. L. Austin, a British philosopher of language, explored during his Harvard lectures in 1995. His philosophy became greatly influential and constituted the beginning of Speech Act Theory.

The Origins of Speech Act Theory: J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein 

Austin and the later Wittgenstein were interested in how we use language rather than speculating about its abstract nature. In the Philosophical Investigations , published posthumously in 1953, Wittgenstein observed that language was like a toolbox: hammers and screwdrivers are an analogy to the different functions words can have (2009, op. § 11). What type of functions/usages can we find?

The Austrian philosopher believed there is no such thing as a static list of usages. From giving orders and describing a state of affairs, to making jokes and promises, the usages are countless : “Countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, and ‘sentences’.” (Wittgenstein, 2009, op. § 23a). The emphasis on “countless” ( unzählige in German) means that one cannot simply make a taxonomy of usages; put differently, there are not easy to categorize.

Get the latest articles delivered to your inbox

Please check your inbox to activate your subscription.

Languages come into and go into existence. Some are born while others “become obsolete and forgotten” (Wittgenstein, 2009, op. § 23a). Historical linguists support this idea: it is only in historical practices that one finds the unfolding of language (Deutscher, 2006, p. 9 & 114). Contrary to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin argued that classifying them could indeed be possible. That effort became the core of his Harvard lectures in 1995 from which Speech Act theory emerged.

What Are Speech Acts?

Austin made a provisional division between constative and performative sentences. While constative sentences had truth value (can be true or false), performatives were successful or not, or like Austin wrote, happy or unhappy (2020, p. 18).

Consider the sentence: ‘A water molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom”. Clearly, this sentence is describing the world. It is stating a fact that can be true or false. But what fact is being described by Ronald Regan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? The second utterance is performative because it is neither true nor false. As a request, it could be either felicitous or infelicitous (another terminology for happy or unhappy). A request is felicitous when it changes the future such that the request is observed.

We can now define speech acts as, precisely, the act of uttering performative sentences. Later in his lectures, Austin realized that everything we say is, to various extents, performative, so he abandoned the distinction to develop a general theory of speech acts (Huang, 2014, p. 126). Austin introduced new distinctions to elucidate what is happening when someone says something: every utterance (locution) has an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary effect . Let us consider them quickly.

The Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Force of a Speech Act

The illocutionary act refers to the type of speech act that is being performed, this is, the function that the speaker intends to fulfill. The perlocutionary part, on the other hand, is the effect that an utterance could have on the hearer or addressee (Huang, 2014, p. 128).

As an illustration, recall that on December 8, 1941, the US Congress declared war on the Empire of Japan responding to the previous attack on Pearl Harbor . President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed congress. In his discourse, one can distinguish illocutionary acts: promises (to the US) and warnings (to Japan), also including his requests for the state of war to be recognized.

We can speculate about the perlocutionary effects: some people were moved and excited, while others could have experienced fear and anxiety, as it was now clear that the United States would join World War II . The perlocutionary effect, therefore, does not depend on the intention of the speaker. I cannot say “I hereby scare you” or “I hereby convince you”.

Classifying Speech Acts

Focusing on the illocutionary act, J.L. Austin was ready to classify speech acts. He did this by using performative verbs that make the illocutionary act explicit (e.g., ‘I declare’, ‘I promise’). He ended up with six types: verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives (Austin, 2020, p. 166). The following table summarizes and explains his classification.

John Searle’s Speech Act Theory

Austin’s classification of speech acts was closely examined and greatly improved by his student John Searle. In his book Expression and Meaning (1979), instead of focusing on performative verbs, he distinguishes twelve dimensions of variation in which illocutionary acts differ from one another. However, he decides to build his taxonomy mainly around two: the illocutionary point and the direction of fit (Searle, 1979, p. 5) 1 .

To begin, the illocutionary point is the purpose of the utterance. The illocutionary point of a description is different from, let us say, a command ; but a request and a command have the same illocutionary point: “both are attempts to get the hearer to do something” (Searle, 1979, p. 3). Searle’s illocutionary point is part of Austin’s illocutionary act. In any case, there is something more that distinguishes illocutionary acts, namely, their direction of fit. To explain it Searle uses an example made by Elizabeth Anscombe.

Imagine that a husband goes to the grocery store with a list of things to buy. At the same time, he is being followed by a detective who is observing which products he is acquiring and writing them on a list as well. In the end, both the husband and the detective will have the same list (both contain the same items). Yet, they are different:

“In the case of the shopper’s list, the purpose of the list is, so to speak, to get the world to match the words; the man is supposed to make his actions fit the list. In the case of the detective, the purpose of the list is to make the words match the world; the man is supposed to make the list fit the actions of the shopper.” (Searle, 1979, p. 3).

What Searle is stressing by using Anscombe’s example, is that speech acts (words) relate in different ways to reality (the world). Searle introduces a notation, such that ‘(↓)’ represents a word-to-world direction of fit (that of the detective), and ‘(↑)’ stands for a world-to-word direction of fit (that of the husband). Considering the illocutionary point and the direction of fit I can now summarize Searle’s taxonomy.

Searle is conscious of the additional requirement for non-linguistic institutions to exist so that ‘directive speech acts’ are successful (happy). A command, for example, is obeyed once the speaker is in a position of authority over the hearer (Searle, 1969, p. 66). This point was made in the Harvard Lectures as well (Austin, 2020, p. 18). In the case of ‘Expressives’ the direction of fit is presupposed because when one congratulates or expresses condolence there is already an antecedent speech act that is being assumed (Searle, 2010, p. 12).

For Searle, the most interesting speech acts are ‘Declarations”. Declarations bring about correspondence between the propositional content of an utterance and reality, this is, they create reality by representing it . In this sense when the proper authority in an appropriate context says “I declare you husband and wife” the content of that utterance is now real; this is why there is a double direction of fit (↕).

The Future of Speech Act Theory

Speech Act Theory is deeply influential in the modern philosophy of language, linguistics, social theory, Critical Theory , and discourse studies, among others. Some have tried to extend the classification of speech acts based on Searle (Ballmer & Brennenstuhl, 1981). The most challenging part about speech acts is, nevertheless, that they are not necessarily linguistic, this is, one can perform a speech act by gesture or by pointing at things. Additionally, some speech acts can be nested, such that the question ‘where is the salt?’ contains, in the context of dinner, a nested directive: ‘pass the salt’ or ‘please pass the salt’.

The most important idea to remember from speech act theory is this: in speaking we are not only describing things, but we are also performing actions and interacting with reality. We can commit ourselves to promises, we can influence the behavior of others, and we can choose to declare war.

Austin, J. L. (2020). How to do things with words (Kindle Ver). Barakaldo Books.

Ballmer, T., & Brennenstuhl, W. (1981). Speech Act Classification . Springer Verlag.

Deutscher, G. (2006). The Unfolding of Language. The evolution of mankind’s greatest invention . London: Arrow Books.

Huang, Y. (2014). Pragmatics (Second). Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. (1979). Expression and Meaning . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. (2010). Making the Social World . Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations . (G. E. M. Anscombe, Ed.) (4th ed.). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

1 The third dimension is also relevant although we will not discuss it here: the expressed psychological state.

The Economic Effects of the Cold War: Conservatism Plus Deficit Spending

By Andres Felipe Barrero MA Philosophy, MSc Philosophy, Ph.D. Candidate Andrés has a background in philosophy from Universidad de la Salle in Bogotá, Colombia, where he finished his undergraduate and master`s studies. He completed a second master's at Universität Hamburg, Germany, where he wrote about philosophical theories of Modernity and Secularization. Currently, he is a Ph.D. Candidate at Universität Bremen. His fields of interest include the Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Social Theory, Discourse Studies, Corpus Linguistics, and Natural Language Processing.

Frequently Read Together

6 Artworks Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s Famous Novel

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Turbulent Life of a Philosophical Pioneer

What Is the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations?

• List of Theories
• Privacy Policy
• Opt-out preferences

SPEECH ACT THEORY

INTRODUCTION

The speech act theory considers language as a sort of action rather than a medium to convey and express. The contemporary Speech act theory developed by J. L. Austin a British philosopher of languages, he introduced this theory in 1975 in his well-known book of ‘How do things with words’.  Later John Searle brought the aspects of theory into much higher dimensions. This theory is often used in the field of philosophy of languages. Austin is the one who came up with the findings that people not only uses that language to assert things but also to do things. And people who followed him went to greater depths based on this point.

All sort of linguist communication are comprised of linguistic actions. Previously it was conceived that the very basic unit of communication is words, Symbols, sentences or some kind of token of all of these, but it was speech act theory which suggested that production or issuances if words, symbols are the basic units of communication. This issuance happens during the process of performance of speech act. The meaning of these basic units was considered as the building blocks of mutual understanding between the people intend to communicate.

“ A theory of language is a theory of action”- Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown.

The theory emphasis that the utterances have a different or specific meaning to its user and listener other than its meaning according to the language. The theory further identify that there are two kinds of utterances, they are called constative and performative utterances.  In his book of ‘How do things with words’ Austin clearly talks about the disparities between the constative and performative utterances.

A constative utterances is something which describes or denotes the situation, in relation with the fact of true or false.

Example: The teacher asked Olivia whether she had stolen the candy. Olivia replies “mmmmmm”. Here the utterances of Olivia describes the event in pact of answering her teacher whether the situation was true or false.

The performative utterances is something which do not describes anything at all. The utterances in the sentences or in the part of sentences are normally considered as having a meaning of its own. The feelings, attitudes, emotions and thoughts of the person performing linguistic act are much of a principal unit here.

Example: Bane and Sarah have been dating for the past four years. One fine evening Bane took Sarah to the most expensive restaurant in town. And he ordered the most expensive wine available in the restaurant. Then he moved closer to her and asked her that “ will you marry me?”. Sarah burst with contentment and replied “I will”. Here the “I will” of Sarah express her feelings, attitudes and emotional towards the context. This utterances have its specific meaning only in relation to it specific context.

Further Austin divides his linguistic act into three different categories. They are,

• Locutionary act – This is the act of saying something. It has a meaning and it creates an understandable utterly to convey or express
• Illocutionary act –  It is performed as an act of saying something or as an act of opposed to saying something. The illocutionary utterance has a certain force of it. It well well-versed with certain tones, attitudes, feelings, or emotions. There will be an intention of the speaker or others in illocutionary utterance. It is often used as a tone of warning in day today life
• Perlocutionary act – It normally creates a sense of consequential effects on the audiences. The effects may be in the form of thoughts, imaginations, feelings or emotions. The effect upon the addressee is the main charactership of perlocutionary utterances

For example

The locutionary act describes a dangerous situation, the illocutionary act acts as a force of the warning and perlocutionary acts frighten the addressee.

Austin himself admits that these three components of utterances are not altogether separable.“We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued- the total speech act – if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterance, and how each can go wrong. Perhaps indeed there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances.” Austin.

Searle suggested that the basic unit of linguistic communication is speech act. It can be a word, a phrase, a sentence or a sound, it should fulfil the task of expressing the intention of the user.  Understanding the user’s intention can lead to complete understanding of the speech act.

The context of speech act is in the context of situation than explanation. The speech act borrows it ideas from structuralism. The indirect speech act of John Searle was developed based on Austin’s speech act.

Related Posts:

• MEDIUM THEORY
• Diffusion of Innovation Theory
• Computer Mediated Communication

It has written in fabulous manner!!

lookie here

It is a nice script

very triggering to think more about language as cognition, languange as emotion, and language as action

please give us more example of the three levels of speech acts

The simplest and easiest explanation there is. Brief but direct to the point. 🙂

Till now i cannot get it,dod Austen devide Speech acts into constative and performative OR locutionary,illocutionary ,perlocutionary???

It’s a wonderful piece and wish to get more

learned a lot. Thanks!

Article is insightful and straight forward. Thumbs up.

Learned great from it

I do agree with Mari that more specific example is needed for each classification. Without such example， we are still hanging with those philosophical words.

Very impressive!

Thank you, for your contribution.

İ needed to read this twice to understand. The theory isn’t easy to understand in my opinion.

I got a little confusion on locutionary , illocutionary & perlocutionar also in the perforamtive & constative I’ m asking for more examples that I can be well on it.. but the rest are perfect understandable..

Very impressive, direct to the point hence easy to understand,, thanks much…!!

Nicely explained in precise manner.

Nice material

Really helpful for my graduation research and quoted some of it, I’m very grateful.

Paul C. Hoffman dice

Really helpful for my research Nice material

Thank you for this explanation!

Good explanation

Well develop and simple

Leave a Comment

Next post: SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM THEORY

Previous post: Attribution Theory

• Advertising, Public relations, Marketing and Consumer Behavior
• Business Communication
• Communication / General
• Communication Barriers
• Communication in Practice
• Communication Models
• Cultural Communication
• Development Communication
• Group Communication
• Intercultural Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Mass Communication
• Organisational Communication
• Political Communication
• Psychology, Behavioral And Social Science
• Technical Communication
• Visual Communication

Communication Theory

• Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Columbia university is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in gaza and the limits of free speech..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

[TRAIN SCREECHING]

Well, you can hear the helicopter circling. This is Asthaa Chaturvedi. I’m a producer with “The Daily.” Just walked out of the 116 Street Station. It’s the main station for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. And it’s day seven of the Gaza solidarity encampment, where a hundred students were arrested last Thursday.

So on one side of Broadway, you see camera crews. You see NYPD officers all lined up. There’s barricades, steel barricades, caution tape. This is normally a completely open campus. And I’m able to — all members of the public, you’re able to walk through.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Looks like international media is here.

Have your IDs out. Have your IDs out.

Students lining up to swipe in to get access to the University. ID required for entry.

Swipe your ID, please.

Hi, how are you, officer? We’re journalists with “The New York Times.”

You’re not going to get in, all right? I’m sorry.

Hi. Can I help please?

Yeah, it’s total lockdown here at Columbia.

Please have your IDs out ready to swipe.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, the story of how Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators, and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. I spoke with my colleague, Nick Fandos.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

It’s Thursday, April 25.

Nick, if we rewind the clock a few months, we end up at a moment where students at several of the country’s best known universities are protesting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks, its approach to a war in Gaza. At times, those protests are happening peacefully, at times with rhetoric that is inflammatory. And the result is that the leaders of those universities land before Congress. But the president of Columbia University, which is the subject we’re going to be talking about today, is not one of the leaders who shows up for that testimony.

That’s right. So the House Education Committee has been watching all these protests on campus. And the Republican Chairwoman decides, I’m going to open an investigation, look at how these administrations are handling it, because it doesn’t look good from where I sit. And the House last winter invites the leaders of several of these elite schools, Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, to come and testify in Washington on Capitol Hill before Congress.

Now, the President of Columbia has what turns out to be a very well-timed, pre-planned trip to go overseas and speak at an international climate conference. So Minouche Shafik isn’t going to be there. So instead, the presidents of Harvard, and Penn, and MIT show up. And it turned out to be a disaster for these universities.

They were asked very pointed questions about the kind of speech taking place on their campuses, and they gave really convoluted academic answers back that just baffled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnect between the Committee — And it wasn’t just Republicans, Republicans and Democrats on the Committee — and these college presidents. And that’s when they were asked a hypothetical.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.

And two of the presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, they’re unwilling to say in this really kind of intense back and forth that this speech would constitute a violation of their rules.

It can be, depending on the context.

What’s the context?

Targeted at an individual. Is it pervasive?

It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?

And it sets off a firestorm.

It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.

Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off. Trustees of the University start to wonder, I don’t know that these leaders really have got this under control. And eventually, both of them lose their jobs in a really high profile way.

Right. And as you’ve hinted at, for somewhat peculiar scheduling reasons, Columbia’s President escapes this disaster of a hearing in what has to be regarded as the best timing in the history of the American Academy.

Yeah, exactly. And Columbia is watching all this play out. And I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair, but also a recognition that, sooner or later, their turn was going to come back around and they were going to have to sit before Congress.

Why were they so certain that they would probably end up before Congress and that this wasn’t a case of completely dodging a bullet?

Well, they remain under investigation by the committee. But also, as the winter wears on, all the same intense protests just continue unabated. So in many ways, Columbia’s like these other campuses. But in some ways, it’s even more intense. This is a university that has both one of the largest Jewish student populations of any of its peers. But it also has a large Arab and Muslim student population, a big Middle Eastern studies program. It has a dual degree program in Tel Aviv.

And it’s a university on top of all that that has a real history of activism dating back to the 1960s. So when students are recruited or choose to come to Columbia, they’re actively opting into a campus that prides itself on being an activist community. It’s in the middle of New York City. It’s a global place. They consider the city and the world, really, like a classroom to Columbia.

In other words, if any campus was going to be a hotbed of protest and debate over this conflict, it was going to be Columbia University.

Exactly. And when this spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s President, to come and testify. And this time, she has no excuse to say no.

But presumably, she is well aware of exactly what testifying before this committee entails and is highly prepared.

Columbia knew this moment was coming. They spent months preparing for this hearing. They brought in outside consultants, crisis communicators, experts on anti-Semitism. The weekend before the hearing, she actually travels down to Washington to hole up in a war room, where she starts preparing her testimony with mock questioners and testy exchanges to prep her for this. And she’s very clear on what she wants to try to do.

Where her counterparts had gone before the committee a few months before and looked aloof, she wanted to project humility and competence, to say, I know that there’s an issue on my campus right now with some of these protests veering off into anti-Semitic incidents. But I’m getting that under control. I’m taking steps in good faith to make sure that we restore order to this campus, while allowing people to express themselves freely as well.

So then the day of her actual testimony arrives. And just walk us through how it goes.

The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order. I note that —

So Wednesday morning rolls around. And President Shafik sits at the witness stand with two of her trustees and the head of Columbia’s new anti-Semitism task force.

Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people.

And right off the bat, they’re put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what’s been happening on campus.

For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick.

The Republican Chairwoman of the Committee, Virginia Foxx, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations, and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafik is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Mr. Greenwald?

And she answers unequivocally.

Dr. Shafik?

Yes, it does.

And, Professor —

That would be a violation of Columbia’s rules. They would be punished.

As President of Columbia, what is it like when you hear chants like, by any means necessary or Intifada Revolution?

I find those chants incredibly distressing. And I wish profoundly that people would not use them on our campus.

And in some of the most interesting exchanges of the hearing, President Shafik actually opens Columbia’s disciplinary books.

We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation. These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken probably in the last decade at Columbia. And —

She talks about the number of students that have been suspended, but also the number of faculty that she’s had removed from the classroom that are being investigated for comments that either violate some of Columbia’s rules or make students uncomfortable. One case in particular really underscores this.

And that’s of a Middle Eastern studies professor named Joseph Massad. He wrote an essay not long after Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government, where he described that attack with adjectives like awesome. Now, he said they’ve been misinterpreted, but a lot of people have taken offense to those comments.

Ms. Stefanik, you’re recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to follow up on my colleague, Rep Walberg’s question regarding Professor Joseph Massad. So let me be clear, President —

And so Representative Elise Stefanik, the same Republican who had tripped up Claudine Gay of Harvard and others in the last hearing, really starts digging in to President Shafik about these things at Columbia.

He is still Chair on the website. So has he been terminated as Chair?

Congresswoman, I —

And Shafik’s answers are maybe a little surprising.

— before getting back to you. I can confirm —

I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.

Yes, I can confirm that. But I —

Did you confirm he was still the Chair?

He says that Columbia is taking his case seriously. In fact, he’s under investigation right now.

Well, let me ask you this.

I need to check.

Will you make the commitment to remove him as Chair?

And when Stefanik presses her to commit to removing him from a campus leadership position —

I think that would be — I think — I would — yes. Let me come back with yes. But I think I — I just want to confirm his current status before I write —

We’ll take that as a yes, that you will confirm that he will no longer be chair.

Shafik seems to pause and think and then agree to it on the spot, almost like she is making administrative decisions with or in front of Congress.

Now, we did some reporting after the fact. And it turns out the Professor didn’t even realize he was under investigation. So he’s learning about this from the hearing too. So what this all adds up to, I think, is a performance so in line with what the lawmakers themselves wanted to hear, that at certain points, these Republicans didn’t quite know what to do with it. They were like the dog that caught the car.

Columbia beats Harvard and UPenn.

One of them, a Republican from Florida, I think at one point even marvelled, well, you beat Harvard and Penn.

Y’all all have done something that they weren’t able to do. You’ve been able to condemn anti-Semitism without using the phrase, it depends on the context. But the —

So Columbia’s president has passed this test before this committee.

Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs, it seems like she has cleared that hurdle and dispatched with the Congressional committee that could have been one of the biggest threats to her presidency.

Without objection, there being no further business, the committee stands adjourned. [BANGS GAVEL]

But back on campus, some of the students and faculty who had been watching the hearing came away with a very different set of conclusions. They saw a president who was so eager to please Republicans in Congress that she was willing to sell out some of the University’s students and faculty and trample on cherished ideas like academic freedom and freedom of expression that have been a bedrock of American higher education for a really long time.

And there was no clearer embodiment of that than what had happened that morning just as President Shafik was going to testify before Congress. A group of students before dawn set up tents in the middle of Columbia’s campus and declared themselves a pro-Palestinian encampment in open defiance of the very rules that Dr. Shafik had put in place to try and get these protests under control.

So these students in real-time are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia’s president has just said before Congress.

Exactly. And so instead of going to celebrate her successful appearance before Congress, Shafik walks out of the hearing room and gets in a black SUV to go right back to that war room, where she’s immediately confronted with a major dilemma. It basically boils down to this, she had just gone before Congress and told them, I’m going to get tough on these protests. And here they were. So either she gets tough and risks inflaming tension on campus or she holds back and does nothing and her words before Congress immediately look hollow.

And what does she decide?

So for the next 24 hours, she tries to negotiate off ramps. She consults with her Deans and the New York Police Department. And it all builds towards an incredibly consequential decision. And that is, for the first time in decades, to call the New York City Police Department onto campus in riot gear and break this thing up, suspend the students involved, and then arrest them.

To essentially eliminate this encampment.

Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafik actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full blown crisis.

[SLOW TEMPO MUSIC]

After the break, what all of this has looked like to a student on Columbia’s campus. We’ll be right back.

[PHONE RINGS]

Is this Isabella?

Yes, this is she.

Hi, Isabella. It’s Michael Barbaro from “The Daily.”

Hi. Nice to meet you.

Earlier this week, we called Isabella Ramírez, the Editor in Chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, “The Columbia Daily Spectator,” which has been closely tracking both the protests and the University’s response to them since October 7.

So, I mean, in your mind, how do we get to this point? I wonder if you can just briefly describe the key moments that bring us to where we are right now.

Sure. Since October 7, there has certainly been constant escalation in terms of tension on campus. And there have been a variety of moves that I believe have distanced the student body, the faculty, from the University and its administration, specifically the suspension of Columbia’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And that became a huge moment in what was characterized as suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, effectively rendering those groups, quote, unquote, unauthorized.

What was the college’s explanation for that?

They had cited in that suspension a policy which states that a demonstration must be approved within a certain window, and that there must be an advance notice, and that there’s a process for getting an authorized demonstration. But the primary point was this policy that they were referring to, which we later reported, was changed before the suspension.

So it felt a little ad hoc to people?

Yes, it certainly came as a surprise, especially at “Spectator.” We’re nerds of the University in the sense that we are familiar with faculty and University governance. But even to us, we had no idea where this policy was coming from. And this suspension was really the first time that it entered most students’ sphere.

Columbia’s campus is so known for its activism. And so in my time of being a reporter, of being an editor, I’ve overseen several protests. And I’ve never seen Columbia penalize a group for, quote, unquote, not authorizing a protest. So that was certainly, in our minds, unprecedented.

And I believe part of the justification there was, well, this is a different time. And I think that is a reasonable thing to say. But I think a lot of students, they felt it was particularly one-sided, that it was targeting a specific type of speech or a specific type of viewpoint. Although, the University, of course, in its explicit policies, did not outline, and was actually very explicit about not targeting specific viewpoints —

So just to be super clear, it felt to students — and it sounds like, journalistically, it felt to you — that the University was coming down in a uniquely one-sided way against students who were supporting Palestinian rights and may have expressed some frustrations with Israel in that moment.

Yes. Certainly —

Isabella says that this was just the beginning of a really tense period between student protesters and the University. After those two student groups were suspended, campus protests continued. Students made a variety of demands. They asked that the University divest from businesses that profit from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. But instead of making any progress, the protests are met with further crackdown by the University.

And so as Isabella and her colleagues at the college newspaper see it, there’s this overall chilling effect that occurs. Some students become fearful that if they participate in any demonstrations, they’re going to face disciplinary action. So fast forward now to April, when these student protesters learned that President Shafik is headed to Washington for her congressional testimony. It’s at this moment that they set out to build their encampment.

I think there was obviously a lot of intention in timing those two things. I think it’s inherently a critique on a political pressure and this congressional pressure that we saw build up against, of course, Claudine Gay at Harvard and Magill at UPenn. So I think a lot of students and faculty have been frustrated at this idea that there are not only powers at the University that are dictating what’s happening, but there are perhaps external powers that are also guiding the way here in terms of what the University feels like it must do or has to do.

And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes to different places.

All eyes were going to be on Shafik in DC. But now a lot of eyes are on New York. The encampment is set up in the middle of the night slash morning, prior to the hearing. And so what effectively happens is they caught Shafik when she wasn’t on campus, when a lot of senior administration had their resources dedicated to supporting Shafik in DC.

And you have all of those people not necessarily out of commission, but with their focus elsewhere. So the encampment is met with very little resistance at the beginning. There were public safety officers floating around and watching. But at the very beginning hours, I think there was a sense of, we did it.

[CHANTING]: Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest. Disclose! Divest! We will not stop!

It would be quite surprising to anybody and an administrator to now suddenly see dozens of tents on this lawn in a way that I think very purposely puts an imagery of, we’re here to stay. As the morning evolved and congressional hearings continued —

Minouche Shafik, open your eyes! Use of force, genocide!

Then we started seeing University delegates that were coming to the encampment saying, you may face disciplinary action for continuing to be here. I think that started around almost — like 9:00 or 10:00 AM, they started handing out these code of conduct violation notices.

Hell no! Hell no! Hell no!

Then there started to be more public safety action and presence. So they started barricading the entrances. The day progressed, there was more threat of discipline. The students became informed that if they continue to stay, they will face potential academic sanctions, potential suspension.

The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be! The more they —

I think a lot of people were like, OK, you’re threatening us with suspension. But so what?

This is about these systems that Minouche Shafik, that the Board of Trustees, that Columbia University is complicit in.

What are you going to do to try to get us out of here? And that was, obviously, promptly answered.

This is the New York State Police Department.

We will not stop!

You are attempting participate in an unauthorized encampment. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

My phone blew up, obviously, from the reporters, from the editors, of saying, oh my god, the NYPD is on our campus. And as soon as I saw that, I came out. And I saw a huge crowd of students and affiliates on campus watching the lawns. And as I circled around that crowd, I saw the last end of the New York Police Department pulling away protesters and clearing out the last of the encampment.

[CHANTING]: We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you! We see you! We love you! We will get justice for you!

It was something truly unimaginable, over 100 students slash other individuals are arrested from our campus, forcefully removed. And although they were suspended, there was a feeling of traumatic event that has just happened to these students, but also this sense of like, OK, the worst of the worst that could have happened to us just happened.

And for those students who maybe couldn’t go back to — into campus, now all of their peers, who were supporters or are in solidarity, are — in some sense, it’s further emboldened. They’re now not just sitting on the lawns for a pro-Palestinian cause, but also for the students, who have endured quite a lot.

So the crackdown, sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD, ends up, you’re saying, becoming a galvanizing force for a broader group of Columbia students than were originally drawn to the idea of ever showing up on the center of campus and protesting?

Yeah, I can certainly speak to the fact that I’ve seen my own peers, friends, or even acquaintances, who weren’t necessarily previously very involved in activism and organizing efforts, suddenly finding themselves involved.

Can I — I just have a question for you, which is all journalism, student journalism or not student journalism, is a first draft of history. And I wonder if we think of this as a historic moment for Columbia, how you imagine it’s going to be remembered.

Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be a historic moment for Colombia.

I think that this will be remembered as a moment in which the fractures were laid bare. Really, we got to see some of the disunity of the community in ways that I have never really seen it before. And what we’ll be looking to is, where do we go from here? How does Colombia repair? How do we heal from all of this? so That is the big question in terms of what will happen.

Nick, Isabella Ramírez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafik did not quell much of anything. It seemed, instead, to really intensify everything on campus. I’m curious what this has looked like for Shafik.

It’s not just the students who are upset. You have faculty, including professors, who are not necessarily sympathetic to the protesters’ view of the war, who are really outraged about what Shafik has done here. They feel that she’s crossed a boundary that hasn’t been crossed on Columbia’s campus in a really long time.

And so you start to hear things by the end of last week like censure, no confidence votes, questions from her own professors about whether or not she can stay in power. So this creates a whole new front for her. And on top of it all, as this is going on, the encampment itself starts to reform tent-by-tent —

— almost in the same place that it was. And Shafik decides that the most important thing she could do is to try and take the temperature down, which means letting the encampment stand. Or in other words, leaning in the other direction. This time, we’re going to let the protesters have their say for a little while longer.

The problem with that is that, over the weekend, a series of images start to emerge from on campus and just off of it of some really troubling anti-Semitic episodes. In one case, a guy holds up a poster in the middle of campus and points it towards a group of Jewish students who are counter protesting. And it says, I’m paraphrasing here, Hamas’ next targets.

I saw an image of that. What it seemed to evoke was the message that Hamas should murder those Jewish students. That’s the way the Jewish students interpreted it.

It’s a pretty straightforward and jarring statement. At the same time, just outside of Columbia’s closed gates —

Stop killing children!

— protestors are showing up from across New York City. It’s hard to tell who’s affiliated with Columbia, who’s not.

Go back to Poland! Go back to Poland!

There’s a video that goes viral of one of them shouting at Jewish students, go back to Poland, go back to Europe.

In other words, a clear message, you’re not welcome here.

Right. In fact, go back to the places where the Holocaust was committed.

Exactly. And this is not representative of the vast majority of the protesters in the encampment, who mostly had been peaceful. They would later hold a Seder, actually, with some of the pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters in their ranks. But those videos are reaching members of Congress, the very same Republicans that Shafik had testified in front of just a few days before. And now they’re looking and saying, you have lost control of your campus, you’ve turned back on your word to us, and you need to resign.

They call for her outright resignation over this.

That’s right. Republicans in New York and across the country began to call for her to step down from her position as president of Columbia.

So Shafik’s dilemma here is pretty extraordinary. She has set up this dynamic where pleasing these members of Congress would probably mean calling in the NYPD all over again to sweep out this encampment, which would mean further alienating and inflaming students and faculty, who are still very upset over the first crackdown. And now both ends of this spectrum, lawmakers in Washington, folks on the Columbia campus, are saying she can’t lead the University over this situation before she’s even made any fateful decision about what to do with this second encampment. Not a good situation.

No. She’s besieged on all sides. For a while, the only thing that she can come up with to offer is for classes to go hybrid for the remainder of the semester.

So students who aren’t feeling safe in this protest environment don’t necessarily have to go to class.

Right. And I think if we zoom out for a second, it’s worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she’s kind of ended up in the exact same thicket, with people calling for her job with the White House, the Mayor of New York City, and others. These are Democrats. Maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don’t know what’s going on your campus. This does not look good.

That reality, that taking a different tack that was supposed to be full of learnings and lessons from the stumbles of her peers, the fact that didn’t really work suggests that there’s something really intractable going on here. And I wonder how you’re thinking about this intractable situation that’s now arrived on these college campuses.

Well, I don’t think it’s just limited to college campuses. We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We’ve seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.

In our media.

We’ve seen it in the media. But college campuses, at least in their most idealized form, are something special. They’re a place where students get to go for four years to think in big ways about moral questions, and political questions, and ideas that help shape the world they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in.

And so when you have a question that feels as urgent as this war does for a lot of people, I think it reverberates in an incredibly intense way on those campuses. And there’s something like — I don’t know if it’s quite a contradiction of terms, but there’s a collision of different values at stake. So universities thrive on the ability of students to follow their minds and their voices where they go, to maybe even experiment a little bit and find those things.

But there are also communities that rely on people being able to trust each other and being able to carry out their classes and their academic endeavors as a collective so they can learn from one another. So in this case, that’s all getting scrambled. Students who feel strongly about the Palestinian cause feel like the point is disruption, that something so big, and immediate, and urgent is happening that they need to get in the faces of their professors, and their administrators, and their fellow students.

Right. And set up an encampment in the middle of campus, no matter what the rules say.

Right. And from the administration’s perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that. And that’s an important process. But maybe there’s some bad apples in your ranks. Or though you may have good intentions, you’re saying things that you don’t realize the implications of. And they’re making this environment unsafe for others. Or they’re grinding our classes to a halt and we’re not able to function as a University.

So the only way we’re going to be able to move forward is if you will respect our rules and we’ll respect your point of view. The problem is that’s just not happening. Something is not connecting with those two points of view. And as if that’s not hard enough, you then have Congress and the political system with its own agenda coming in and putting its thumb on a scale of an already very difficult situation.

Right. And at this very moment, what we know is that the forces that you just outlined have created a dilemma, an uncertainty of how to proceed, not just for President Shafik and the students and faculty at Columbia, but for a growing number of colleges and universities across the country. And by that, I mean, this thing that seemed to start at Columbia is literally spreading.

Absolutely. We’re talking on a Wednesday afternoon. And these encampments have now started cropping up at universities from coast-to-coast, at Harvard and Yale, but also at University of California, at the University of Texas, at smaller campuses in between. And at each of these institutions, there’s presidents and deans, just like President Shafik at Columbia, who are facing a really difficult set of choices. Do they call in the police? The University of Texas in Austin this afternoon, we saw protesters physically clashing with police.

Do they hold back, like at Harvard, where there were dramatic videos of students literally running into Harvard yard with tents. They were popping up in real-time. And so Columbia, really, I think, at the end of the day, may have kicked off some of this. But they are now in league with a whole bunch of other universities that are struggling with the same set of questions. And it’s a set of questions that they’ve had since this war broke out.

And now these schools only have a week or two left of classes. But we don’t know when these standoffs are going to end. We don’t know if students are going to leave campus for the summer. We don’t know if they’re going to come back in the fall and start protesting right away, or if this year is going to turn out to have been an aberration that was a response to a really awful, bloody war, or if we’re at the beginning of a bigger shift on college campuses that will long outlast this war in the Middle East.

Well, Nick, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The United Nations is calling for an independent investigation into two mass graves found after Israeli forces withdrew from hospitals in Gaza. Officials in Gaza said that some of the bodies found in the graves were Palestinians who had been handcuffed or shot in the head and accused Israel of killing and burying them. In response, Israel said that its soldiers had exhumed bodies in one of the graves as part of an effort to locate Israeli hostages.

And on Wednesday, Hamas released a video of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American dual citizen, whom Hamas has held hostage since October 7. It was the first time that he has been shown alive since his captivity began. His kidnapping was the subject of a “Daily” episode in October that featured his mother, Rachel. In response to Hamas’s video, Rachel issued a video of her own, in which she spoke directly to her son.

And, Hersh, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you, we are telling you, we love you. Stay strong. Survive.

Today’s episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Olivia Natt, Nina Feldman, and Summer Thomad, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow, contains research help by Susan Lee, original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
• April 25, 2024   •   40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters
• April 24, 2024   •   32:18 Is $60 Billion Enough to Save Ukraine?
• April 23, 2024   •   30:30 A Salacious Conspiracy or Just 34 Pieces of Paper?
• April 22, 2024   •   24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
• April 19, 2024   •   30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
• April 18, 2024   •   30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
• April 17, 2024   •   24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
• April 16, 2024   •   29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
• April 15, 2024   •   24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
• April 14, 2024   •   46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
• April 12, 2024   •   34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Nicholas Fandos

Produced by Sydney Harper ,  Asthaa Chaturvedi ,  Olivia Natt ,  Nina Feldman and Summer Thomad

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Devon Taylor and Lisa Chow

Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.

Nicholas Fandos, who covers New York politics and government for The Times, walks us through the intense week at the university. And Isabella Ramírez, the editor in chief of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, explains what it has all looked like to a student on campus.

On today’s episode

Nicholas Fandos , who covers New York politics and government for The New York Times

Isabella Ramírez , editor in chief of The Columbia Daily Spectator

Background reading

Inside the week that shook Columbia University .

The protests at the university continued after more than 100 arrests.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Research help by Susan Lee .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government. More about Nicholas Fandos

Advertisement