A new model of illocutionary force

Abbott, Simon

A new model of illocutionary force

Master Thesis

2015

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Social Anthropology

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

In a series of lectures delivered in the early 1950s and later compiled and released in print as How to do things with Words , J.L. Austin elaborated on the idea that the capacity of language to describe the world was, despite the pre-eminence habitually granted to it by philosophy, really just one among several capacities and that, more generally, language endows its users with the tool to perform certain kinds of acts, called illocutionary acts or, later, speech acts . Speaking, Austin argued, was really a form of action; to say something is always just as much to do something. In the course of the lectures, Austin introduced some relatively well-known theoretical ideas, such as the category of performative utterances. The final lecture describes a taxonomy of utterances according to their illocutionary force. This taxonomy has for most thinkers proven less interesting than some of the moves he makes to get there. Comparatively few thinkers (Searle is the obvious exception, and there are a few others) have shown any interest developing, applying or criticising Austin’s taxonomy. The initial isolation of the class of performative utterances, on the other hand, despite the fact that it turns out to be for Austin essentially no more than a piece of intellectual scaffolding, has provoked an ongoing debate and numerous elaborations in fields as diverse as sociology, literary criticism and gender theory, as well as analytic philosophy. This paper has three chapters. Chapter One comprises a summary of How to do things with Words, followed by a brief discussion of some issues arising from it. The summary is expository, although rather than being comprehensive it focusses on matters relevant to the following chapters. The brief discussion that closes the chapter looks at a question in analytic philosophy (whether someone who makes a promise simultaneously states that they are promising), raises the question of the precise sense in which illocutionary acts are acts at all, and how illocutionary acts are related to the existence of conventions. Chapter Two describes the work or several writers who have been influenced by Austin, and How to do things with Words in particular. John Searle was a student of Austin's and the first writer to produce a substantial critique of Austin and an elaborate the theory of speech acts. Searle's most enduring contribution is probably his taxonomy of speech acts, which became a more or less standard point of reference, in contrast to Austin's, which faded into 4 obscurity. The lack of interest in Austin's taxonomy since Searle published his is not especially surprising, since the latter is presented with a great deal more confidence. It has not been without its critics, however: anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, for example published an influential critique of it in which she argued that it presented features of contemporary American culture as if they were universals, when in fact other cultures have completely different ways of organising speech acts (Rosaldo 1982). In this chapter I also look at Jacques Derrida's reading of Austin (Derrida 1988), which picks up on the aspects of language that Austin and Searle excluded from their theories and raises some important problems in the relationship of speech acts and personal agency to which Austin and particularly Searle seem to be committed. I then look at what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1992) made of certain Austinian ideas in his explorations of language and power, and end with a brief outline of one way in which speech acts have been analysed by empirical researchers (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984), to illustrate that a very different breakdown of the speech act may be appropriate for different purposes. Apart from Searle, the volume of whose output on the topic makes his inclusion in this chapter uncontroversial, the selection of writers presented in Chapter Two probably seems eclectic, not to mention uneven. Where for example are Kent Bach and Robert Harnish? Though Bach and Harnish are no doubt significant scholars in the field, their interest seemed to me too narrowly philosophical. I have chosen theorists who have raised questions about speech act theory at an arguably more fundamental level, pointed out gaps in its coverage or brought in insights from other disciplines. The reason for this is that Chapter Three presents a new classification of speech acts, partly as a way of re-examining the foundations of speech act theory, and partly with the aim of modifying it to extend its coverage to a greater range of communication phenomena. It is a model of illocutionary forces, instead of illocutionary acts, that aims to meet some (if not all) of the challenges to the classification of speech acts presented by the theorists covered in Chapter Two. This is done, principally, through an integration of Searle's taxonomy, modified in several important ways, with Roman Jakobson's model of the functions of language (Jakobson 1960, 1980).

Description

Includes bibliography.

Keywords

Linguistics

Reference:

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Masters

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