Term
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Definition
There are two essences of the speech act idea: i) All day long, language is our principal means of getting anything done that requires the
cooperation of or interaction with other people. The pieces of language we use to do this are
called speech acts. Thus, language isn’t just a way of communicating; it is a way of doing. ii) It also manages relationships with other people. |
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Term
| The difference between sentence and utterance |
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Definition
this applies to any bit of language, from word to text. A non-utterance is a bit of language that occurs in a communicative vacuum, in the absence of any context. As you might imagine, very little such language exists. The very raison d’etre of language is to communicate. Even linguistic examples in textbooks have a communicative purpose (to illustrate the content being presented). The Dead Sea Scrolls, written thousands of years ago and found in modern times in a cave near the Dead Sea, count as an utterance: those who wrote them had the intent to communicate, and those who found them desired to decode and interpret them.
Thus, an utterance is actually-occurring language created in a social context, with some kind of communicative or expressive intent. It can be a spoken word, sentence, or longer stretch of language; it can also be written. |
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Term
| The Cooperative Principle |
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Definition
Human communication and productive human interaction would be impossible without certain guarantees. Suppose you could not trust anyone to tell the truth. Suppose your conversation partners regularly veered off of the topic onto irrelevant subjects. Suppose everyone you met spoke to you in riddles or in extremely long, complex sentences. Suppose the people you spoke to every day were like Humpty Dumpty: a word would mean whatever they liked it to mean.
Well, human communication is not like that, thankfully. And we take for granted that it is not, because, most of the time, people respect a kind of unspoken pact called the Cooperative Principle. This is a pact to participate in linguistic interaction with the sincere intent for it to succeed. Generally, the Principle is said to comprise four maxims:
1. Maxim of Quantity: say neither too much nor too little. 2. Maxim of Relevance: stay on topic, or respect conventions for changing topic.1 3. Maxim of Manner: make your message intelligible; avoid ambiguity; do not be mysterious or cagey,
or deliberately confuse your conversation partners; follow conventional structures and sequences of
different text types.2 4. Maxim of Quality: tell what you know or what you believe to be true.
We’ve all met people who violate maxims on a regular basis, and are therefore difficult to deal with: the chronic liar, the windbag, the airhead who can’t stay on the thread for more than a minute, the tight-lipped guarder of secrets. These are well-known personality flaws. |
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Term
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Definition
| say neither too much nor too little |
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Term
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Definition
| stay on topic, or respect conventions for changing topic. |
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Term
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Definition
make your message intelligible; avoid ambiguity; do not be mysterious or cagey,
or deliberately confuse your conversation partners; follow conventional structures and sequences of
different text types. |
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Term
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Definition
| tell what you know or what you believe to be true |
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Term
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Definition
Can you pass the salt?
This was given above as an example of an indirect speech act, one in which the locution and the illocution do not match. The locution here is a query about ability, while the illocution is a request for the addressee to pass the salt. As noted above, indirect speech acts violate the Cooperative Principle, in this case, manner, because the wrong sentence structure was used for a request.
Many conventional uses of language violate the Cooperative Principle: irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, little white lies, metaphor, metonymy, and so on. How can people manage, when I’ve just finished saying how crucial the Cooperative Principle is to human interaction?
Oddly enough, they use the Cooperative Principle to figure out that the speaker must have meant something other than the actual utterance. Recognizing that the utterance doesn’t make sense in context, they assume the speaker was deliberately violating one or another maxim for a particular purpose, and not to sabotage the conversation. Thus, the addressee relies on the Cooperative Principle even when it is being violated: she or he trusts that the speaker is still adhering to the intent of the Cooperative Principle. If speaker and addressee share the knowledge necessary to understand the illocution – the speaker’s purpose – the speech act will succeed.
This brings to mind another point: part of learning a language/culture is learning how direct and indirect speech acts are done. It should be obvious that misinterpreting an indirect speech act could lead to an embarrassing situation. |
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Term
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Definition
As noted above, we use language to manage social relationships: start them, end them, change them, maintain the status quo. A major concern in every society is politeness: being pleasant and helpful towards others, and showing that they are valued. One way of doing this is via indirect speech acts: I wonder if you could possibly shut the door is much more polite than shut the door, especially to a stranger.
Researchers have split politeness into two kinds: negative politeness (also known as negative face) and positive politeness (also known as positive face). These two are said to be related to independence vs. involvement, respectively. |
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Term
| negative politeness, negative face, independence |
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Definition
respecting a person’s right to privacy, to not be imposed upon, to not have their time taken up, to be left alone when they so desire.
o Typical expressions: excuse me; I’m sorry!; please pardon the interruption; is this a good time to talk?; I couldn’t help overhearing, etc. |
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Term
| positive politeness, positive face, involvement |
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Definition
reaching out to someone to indicate your good feelings towards them; indicating your interest in including them; doing things to make someone feel good about her/himself.
o compliments; invitations; praise; enthusiastic greetings and leavetakings. |
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Term
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Definition
| Representatives, Commissives, Directives, Declarations, Expressives, Verdictives |
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Term
| Locutions and illocutions |
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Definition
This is very important. The locution of an utterance comprises its linguistic form (question, statement, command) and the default function that is assigned to it in the language. For example, a yes/no question has the form AUX subject nonfinite verb plus possible additional material: “Are you coming tonight?” (Are = AUX, you = subject, coming =nonfinite verb, tonight = additional material). The default function associated with this form is to elicit confirmation or disconfirmation of the content: “Yes, I am” or “No, I’m not.”
The illocution of an utterance is the speech act that the speaker intends to use the structure for. Appealing again to the Maxim of Manner, we would expect locution and illocution to match up always. But, because of the above-mentioned need to manage social relationships through language, they do not always do so. The simple example Can you pass the salt? can serve again to explain: here we have a yes/no question by locution, but a request by illocution. The illocution overrides the default function of the sentence structure. Thus, Can you pass the salt? is interpreted not as an elicitation of confirmation or disconfirmation of the addressee’s ability to pass the salt, but as a request to get the salt from the addresses to the speaker.
When locution and illocution match, we have a direct speech act. If you’re at dinner with a companion who has both hands bandaged, Can you pass the salt? might well be an elicitation of confirmation or disconfirmation of your companion’s ability to pass the salt. If your companion’s hands are fully functional, she will interpret your utterance as a request rather than a yes/no question, making locution and illocution different. This is an indirect speech act. |
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Term
| Appropriateness conditions |
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Definition
These are real-world situations which determine whether an utterance counts as one or another speech act. For a speech act to have real-world consequences, certain things have to be true (certain conditions have to hold). These are listed on p. 286. The propositional content condition requires the language structure employed to be conventionally associated with the speech act. The preparatory condition requires the physical surroundings and social qualifications to be correct. The sincerity condition requires the speaker to genuinely intend to carry out the speech act. The essential condition requires that all parties involved either intend or consent to the success of the speech act.
Consider two situations: in one case, a police officer finds a key of marijuana in your glove compartment and utters “You’re under arrest for possession of an illegal substance.” In the other case, you’re at a party with close friends when you pull out a baggie of marijuana to share, and another partygoer jokingly says, in a put-on voice, “You’re under arrest for possession of an illegal substance.” Appropriateness conditions determine whether you are actually under arrest or not.
The officer’s utterance meets all the appropriateness conditions:
Propositional content: The officer utters the correct formula. Preparatory: The marijuana is present in the car, it was placed there by you and not by another, the police officer is a sworn officer invested by law with the authority to arrest, and you are not immune from arrest (as, say, an international diplomat would be). Sincerity: The police officer intends to arrest you. Essential: The police officer certainly intends the arrest to be successful. You may not intend this, but, as a law-abiding citizen, you consent to cooperate with the officer and go along quietly.
(There’s a little bit of a problem here. People who resist arrest, run away, or lead officers on a chase clearly neither intend nor consent to the arrest that might ensue if they’re caught. The officers may have to physically overpower the suspect to accomplish the arrest. It appears that, in some cases, unilateral intention is enough to accomplish the intended outcome of a speech act. Another example is a guilty verdict against a defendant who claims innocence. The defendant certainly neither intends nor consents to being guilty, but has no choice in the face of the law. A custody case lost by a parent is a similar case. The defendant is treated as guilty, and the parent has no permission to have the child, regardless of their intents, desires, or even consent. If the defendant attempts escape, or if the parent kidnaps the child, their status will not change in the eyes of the law.)
Now consider the second case:
Propositional content: The party guest utters the correct formula. Preparatory: You are in possession of the marijuana; the party guest’s authority to arrest you depends on the state where the action takes place. In some states, a citizen’s arrest is allowed for misdemeanor possession of marijuana. Sincerity: Here, the speech act certainly fails: the party guest is joking, and does not intend to arrest you. Essential: The speech act fails here as well: no one there (we assume) intends for the arrest to take place. |
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Term
| Representative Speech Act |
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Definition
| Represent a state of affair: assertions, statements, claims, hypotheses, descriptions, suggestions. Representatives can be generally characterized as true or false. |
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Term
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Definition
| A speech act that commits a speaker to a course of action: a promise, pledge, threats, vows. |
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Definition
| A speech act that is intended to get the addressee to carry out an action: commands, requests, challenges, invitations, entreaties, dares. |
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Definition
| A speech act that indicates the speaker's psychological state or attitude: greetings, apologies, congratulations, condolences, thanksgiving |
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Term
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Definition
| A speech act that brings about the state of affairs that they name: blessings, hirings, firings, baptisms, arrests, marriages, declaring mistrials. |
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Term
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Definition
| A speech act that makes assessments or judgements: ranking, assessing, appraising, condoning. Because some verdictives (such as calling a baseball player out) combine the characteristics of declarations and representatives, these are sometimes called representational declaratives. |
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Term
| The four categories of the appropriateness condition |
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Definition
Propositional content condition
Preparatory condition
Sincerity condition
Essential condition |
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Term
| Propositional content Condition |
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Definition
| requires merely that the words of the sentence be conventionally associated with the intended speech act and convey the content of the act. The locution must exhibit conventionally acceptable words for effecting the particular speech act. |
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Term
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Definition
| requires a conventionally recognized context in which the speech act is embedded. In a marriage, the situation must be a genuine marriage ceremony (however informal) at which two people intend to exchange vows in the presence of a witness. |
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Term
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Definition
| Requires the speaker to be sincere in uttering the declaration. At a wedding, the speaker must intend that the marriage words effectuate a marriage; otherwise, the sincerity condition will be violated and the speech act will not be successful. |
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Definition
| requires that the involved parties all intend the result; for example; in a wedding ceremony, the participants must intend by the utterance of the words "I now pronounce you husband and wife" to create a marriage bond. |
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Term
| Characteristics of Indirect Speech Acts |
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Definition
Indirect Speech acts violate at least one maxim of the cooperative principle.
The literal meaning of the locution of an indirect speech act differs from its intended meaning.
Hearers and readers identify indirect speech acts by noticing that an utterance has the first stated characteristic (see above).
As soon as hearers and readers have identified an indirect speech act, they identify its intended meaning with the help of knowledge of the context and the world. |
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