Speech act
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, a speech act is an utterance considered as an instance of action in a social context rather than as the mere expression of a proposition. To say "I resign", "I apologise" or "You're fired" is, in suitable circumstances, to perform the very act of resigning, apologising or dismissing, not simply to describe it. Speech-act theory therefore treats speaking a language as a kind of rule-governed social behaviour in which people make claims, issue orders, ask questions, make promises and so on by means of utterances.
Following J. L. Austin and John R. Searle, many accounts distinguish at least three levels of act in ordinary utterances: the locutionary act of producing a meaningful expression, the illocutionary act performed in saying something, and the perlocutionary act consisting in its further effects on an audience, such as persuading, amusing or alarming them. Later work has added notions such as metalocutionary acts, which organise or comment on the discourse itself, and has analysed performative utterances and indirect speech acts, in which one kind of act is performed by way of another.
As a systematic theory, the contemporary notion of speech acts originates in Austin's 1955 Harvard lectures published as How to Do Things with Words, and in Searle's subsequent development of explicit rules and taxonomies for illocutionary acts. Historical research has identified important predecessors and parallels, including the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the accounts of "social acts" in the work of Thomas Reid and Adolf Reinach, and early-20th-century linguistic theories of Sprechhandlung, as well as earlier reflections in Hegel on speaking as a form of acting.
Speech-act theory now plays a central role in pragmatics, discourse analysis and communication studies, and has been taken up in a wide range of other fields. In language acquisition it is used to describe how children learn to perform basic communicative acts such as requesting, greeting and protesting; in computer science and information systems it underpins models of human–computer interaction, workflow and multi-agent system communication that treat messages as illocutionary moves creating and discharging commitments; in political science and international relations it informs theories of securitization and the construction of security; and in law, economic sociology and finance it has been applied to the performative role of legal norms and mathematical models in shaping social and economic practices.
History
For much of the early analytic and positivist philosophy of language, language was treated mainly as a vehicle for representing facts and for stating propositions that are either true or false; the action-character of ordinary utterances was largely downplayed or bracketed. J. L. Austin explicitly criticised this presupposition at the beginning of How to Do Things with Words, noting that philosophers had often assumed that the business of a "statement" is simply to "state some fact".A major precursor of speech act theory in the analytic tradition is the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who urged that instead of asking for the abstract meaning of an expression one should look at its use within a practice, and who described speaking a language as engaging in a family of "language-games". On this view, understanding an utterance requires seeing it as a rule-governed move within a social activity, not merely as a bearer of truth-conditions. Subsequent surveys of speech act theory often take this shift to "meaning-as-use" as part of the background to contemporary work on speech acts and pragmatics.
The contemporary use of the expression speech act is usually traced to the work of the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin. In his 1955 Harvard lectures, posthumously published as How to Do Things with Words, Austin introduced the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts and drew attention to "performative" utterances such as "I apologize" or "I promise", in which saying something is already doing something. Austin's analyses encouraged philosophers and linguists to treat a wide range of utterances—requests, orders, apologies, warnings, declarations and so on—as actions performed in accordance with socially recognised rules or "felicity conditions".
Austin's student John R. Searle further systematised these ideas in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language and in later writings, developing explicit rules for the performance of illocutionary acts and proposing influential taxonomies of their types. Subsequent work by Searle and others connected speech act theory with accounts of intentionality, social ontology and discourse structure, and it became a central framework in philosophy of language, pragmatics, communication studies, legal theory and artificial intelligence.
Historical research has shown that Austin and Searle were not the first to analyse what are now called speech acts. In the Scottish common-sense tradition, Thomas Reid distinguished "solitary" mental operations from essentially "social" acts of mind—such as asking, commanding and promising—which require expression to another person and generate obligations between speaker and hearer. Within early phenomenology, Adolf Reinach's 1913 essay Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes developed a detailed ontology of "social acts"—promising, claiming, commanding and related performances—that bring about new normative relations when successfully performed. Reinach's work, together with that of Reid and others, has been recognised as an early, systematic speech-act theory developed independently of the later Oxford tradition.
Comparable ideas were developed in early-20th-century linguistics. The Slovene philologist Stanislav Škrabec analysed performative uses of tense and aspect and discussed utterances in which, as later theorists would say, "saying so makes it so", such as judicial pronouncements and explicit permissions. The psychologist and linguist Karl Bühler employed the terms Sprechhandlung and Theorie der Sprechakte in his 1930s work on the functions of language, especially in Sprachtheorie, which has been read as an important forerunner of later speech act theorising.
Beyond these relatively direct predecessors, some scholars have also emphasised the roots of speech-act thinking in classical German philosophy. In his lectures on the philosophy of right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel describes speaking as a form of acting, linking utterance to the actualisation or transformation of social reality. These earlier reflections on "social" or "performative" uses of language are brought together in historical reconstructions of speech act theory that place Austin and Searle within a broader, multi-stranded tradition.
Types of speech act
Following J. L. Austin's distinction in How to Do Things with Words, many philosophers and linguists analyse ordinary utterances as involving at least three kinds of act: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act, and often a perlocutionary act. Later theories refine this framework but usually retain some version of the threefold distinction.In this tradition, speech acts can be described on multiple, partly overlapping levels:
- A locutionary act is the act of producing a particular linguistic expression with a certain phonological form, syntactic structure and conventional meaning—the act of saying something meaningful in a language.
- An illocutionary act is the act a speaker performs in saying something, characterised by its illocutionary force: for example, asserting that something is the case, asking a question, issuing an order, giving a warning, or making a promise.
- A perlocutionary act is the act a speaker performs by saying something, namely the further effects an utterance has on an audience, such as persuading, discouraging, amusing, frightening, or getting someone to perform a certain action, whether those effects are intended or not. For example, if a speaker says "I'm hungry" and the hearer responds by preparing food, the hearer's reaction can be described as part of the perlocutionary effect of the original utterance.
- A metalocutionary act is a speech act that comments on or organises the discourse itself rather than further advancing its subject matter. In prosody and orthography, metalocutionary functions have been analysed as the use of intonation and punctuation to highlight or delimit portions of an utterance.
Illocutionary acts
Searle develops Austin's insights by treating "speech act" and "illocutionary act" largely interchangeably and by offering a systematic taxonomy of basic illocutionary types characterised in part by the psychological states they express. Whereas Austin tends to emphasise the conventional procedures associated with illocutionary acts, Searle and later authors highlight the role of underlying mental states and inferential recognition in individuating and understanding them.