function of

language
group 8
 members
01 Ade ira miranda

02 Aulia Azzahra Shafira

03 Khofifah Haajar Tsabitah

04 Yukana
 Austin’s Speech Act
Theory
Austin’s work is in many respects a reaction to some traditional and
influential attitudes to language. We can risk simplifying these as a starting
point. The attitudes can be said to involve three related assumptions, as
follows:
a. that the basic sentence type in language is declarative (i.e. a statement
or assertion);
b. that the principal use of language is to describe states of affairs (by using
statements);
c. that the meaning of utterances can be described in terms of their truth or
falsity
He makes two important observations. The first is that not all sentences are statements and that much
of conversation is made up of questions, exclamations, commands, and expressions of wishes like the
examples in below:
a. Excuse me!
b. Are you serving?
c. Hello.
d. Six pints of stout and a packet of peanuts, please!
e. Give me the dry roasted ones.
f. How much? Are you serious?
g. O tempora! O mores!

Austin’s second observation was that even in sentences with the grammatical form
of declaratives, not all are used to make statements. Austin identified a subset of
declaratives that are not used to make true or false statements, such as the
examples in below:
a.I promise to take a taxi home.
b. I bet you five pounds that he gets breathalyzed.
c. I declare this meeting open.
d. I warn you that legal action will ensue. e. I name this ship The Flying Dutchman
01 Evaluating performative utterances

Austin argued that it is not useful to ask whether performative

utterances like those in are true or not, rather we should ask whether they
work or not: do they constitute a successful warning, bet, ship naming and
so on? In Austin’s terminology a performative that works is called
felicitous and one that does not is infelicitous. For them to work, such
performatives have to satisfy the social conventions that we mentioned in
section for a very obvious example, I cannot rename a ship by walking up to
it in dock and saying I name this ship the Flying Dutchman.
02 Explicit and implicit performatives

Utterances with these characteristics we can call explicit performatives. The importance of speech
act theory lies in the way that Austin and others managed to extend their analysis from these
explicit performatives to other utterances. The first step was to point out that in some cases the
same speech act seems to be performed but with a relaxation of some of the special characteristics
mentioned in above. We regularly meet utterances like those in below, where this is so:
a. You are (hereby) charged with treason.
b. Passengers are requested to avoid jumping out of the aircraft.
c. Five pounds says he doesn’t make the semifinal.
d. Come up and see me sometime.

We can easily provide the sentences in above with corresponding explicit performatives, as below:
a. I (hereby) charge you with treason.
b. We request that passengers avoid jumping out of the aircraft.
c. I bet you five pounds that he doesn’t make the semifinal.
d. I invite you to come up and see me sometime.
03 Statements as performatives

In simple terms, Austin argued that there is no theoretically sound way to

distinguish between performatives and constatives. For example, the notion of
felicity applies to statements too: statements which are odd because of
presupposition failure, like the sentence The king of France is bald discussed in
chapter 4, are infelicitous because the speaker has violated the conventions for
referring to individuals (i.e. that the listener can identify them).
04 Three facets of a speech act

Austin proposed that a speech act consists of three elements: the speaker says
something, signals an associated speech act, and causes an effect on the listeners. The
first element, the locutionary act, refers to the speaker's language rules and grammar.
The second element, the speaker's intended action, is the illocutionary act, which focuses
on the uses of language in society. The third element, the perlocutionary act, is the effect
of the illocutionary act on the listeners.
 categorizing speech acts
After Austin's initial exploration of speech act theory, there have been a
number of works that have attempted to systematise the approach. While
acknowledging that there are a large number of distinctive speech acts in
language, it is proposed that all speech acts can be categorised into five
main types:
1. Representatives
2. Directives
3. Commissives
4. Expressives
5. Declaration
Searle distinguishes between preparatory, propositional, sincerity, and
essential conditions for an action. See the example below where we exemplify
the conditions for the act of promising:

Conditions for promise

[where S = speaker, H = hearer, A = future action, P = proposition
proposition stated in the speech act, e = linguistic expression]
a. Preparation 1: H would rather S do A than not do A and S believes that H would rather
S do A than not do A.
b. Preparation 2: It is not clear to S and H that S would do A under normal circumstances.
c. Propositional: In expressing P, S predicts the action A that S will perform in the future.
d. Sincerity: S intends to perform A.
e. Essential: The utterance e is regarded as an attempt to do A.
The conditions for questioning include those in the Example below:

Conditions for questioning

[where S = speaker, H = hearer, P = proposition stated in the speech
act]
a. Preparation 1: S does not know the answer, i.e. for yes/no questions,
does not know whether P is true or false; for elicitation or WH
questions, does not know the missing information.8
b. Preparation 2: It is not clear to S and H that H will provide the
information on the spot without being asked.
c. Propositional: Any proposition or propositional function.
d. Sincerity: S wants this information.
e. Essential: The action is regarded as an attempt to obtain this
information from H.
 Indirect Speech Acts
The typical matching between certain sentence types and speech acts. Thus we
discussed the matching between the interrogative sentence type in English and
the act of questioning. However, as we noted there, quite often this conventional
matching is superseded by an extra, more immediate interpretation. The
conventionally expected function is known as the direct speech act and the extra
actual function is termed the indirect speech act. For example:
The problem is: how do people recognize the indirect act?
We look first at Searle’s (1975) approach. The first question is whether hearers are
only conscious of the indirect act, or whether they have both available and choose the
indirect act as most contextually apt. Searle (1975) argues that speakers do indeed
have access to both: he terms the direct use the literal use of the speech act and the
indirect, the nonliteral use.
.
Searle argues that in the a cases above two speech acts are available to the hearer: the
literal act is backgrounded or secondary while the nonliteral act is primary. “when one of
these sentences is uttered with the primary illocutionary point of a directive, the literal
illocutionary act is also performed” (1975: 70). The question he raises is: how is it that
these but not all nonliteral acts will work, that is, why is it that stating “Salt is made of
sodium chloride” will not work as a request like “Can you pass the salt?”.
Searle’s solution relies on the system of felicity conditions mentioned in the last section. The
conditions for making requests include the following:
Searle argues that other sentence types can only work as indirect requests when they
address one of the conditions for requests. Thus sentence “Can you pass the salt?”
addresses the preparatory condition. This example shows that an indirect request can
be made by asking whether (or stating that) a preparatory condition holds. Searle’s
third example, “Aren’t you going to eat your cereal”, works by asking whether the
propositional content condition holds.
So in this view, indirect speech acts work because they are systematically related to
the structure of the associated direct act: they are tied to one or another of the act’s
felicity conditions.
 Understanding indirect speech acts
Searle’s view of how we understand indirect speech acts is that we combine our
knowledge of three elements to support a chain of inference. The elements are: the
felicity conditions of direct speech acts, the context of the utterance, and principles
of conversational cooperation, such as the Gricean maxims of relevance, quality, and
so on.
Gor don and Lakoff (1975) see hearers as employing shortcuts known as
conversational postulates. These are rules that are engaged whenever the hearer is
encouraged by conversational principles to search for an indirect speech act. The
postulates reduce the amount of inference involved in tracing the indirect act. The
relevant postulate for our present example:
Conversational postulate (Gordon and Lakoff 1975: 86)

ASK (a, b, CAN (b, Q)) → REQUEST (a, b, Q)

In their formalism, it is to be interpreted as “when a speaker a asks whether b can do Q,

this implies a request for b to do Q.” Thus these postulates can be seen as a reflection of
the conventionality of some indirect acts. More generally Gordon and Lakoff agree with
Searle’s suggestion that stating or questioning a felicity condition of a direct act will
produce an indirect version.

The conditions for requests, we can predict that instead of using the
sentence Please come home!, the following indirect strategies are
possible:
a. Question the preparatory condition: Can you please come home?
b. State the sincerity condition: I want you to please come home.
c. Question the propositional content condition: Will you please come home?
 Indirect acts and politeness

Ervin-Tripp’s (1976) study of the social implications of indirect requests and

orders in American English concludes that speakers do calculate issues of
social power and politeness in framing speech acts. She suggests that indirect
interrogative requests are useful because they give “listeners an out by
explicitly stating some condition which would make compliance impossible” (p.
38), as in the following example of an indirect request and response (Ervin-
Tripp 1976: 38):
In Brown and Levinson’s version, face is “the public self-image that every member of
society wants to claim for himself” (1978: 66). For them, face has two components:
positive face, which represents an individual’s desire to seem worthy and deserving of
approval, and negative face, which represents an individual’s desire to be
autonomous, unimpeded by others. A kind of mutual self-interest requires that
conversational participants maintain both their own face and their interactor’s face.
The notion of face, according to Brown and Levinson, is universal: every language
community will have a system of politeness but the details of the system will vary
because face is related to “the most fundamental cultural ideas about the nature of
the social persona, honor and virtue, shame and redemption, and thus to religious
concepts” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 13). Thus politeness strategies, and individual
speech acts, will vary from culture to culture.
 speech act
We have defined a sentence type as a conventional matching between a grammatical form
and a speech act. Thus some languages have a question word which contrasts with a
declarative word. as in the examples A and B below, where there is also a contrast with a
lack of such a word (or zero marking) for the imperative as in C:
a. did you listen to the news?
b. you listened to the news.
c. listen to the news.
As these sentences show, the question word in A is “did you”, while “listened” in b marks a
declarative; these words are called classifiers.
 speech act
The problem however is that such marking by special words or inflections can be used
for a variety of semantic distinctions. We can use some examples from Somali to show
the difficulties, beginning with the lists in table 8.1, where the verb keen "bring" is
used to show the forms. For our current purposes, the question raised by both sections
of table 8.1 is: does every classifier and negative morpheme in table 8.1 mark a
distinct sentence type? The answer we would like to give is: only when it regularly and
conventionally matches a corresponding speech act.
for example suggest some rules of thumb for identifying sentence types, which we can
modify slightly as follows:
speech act
a. The sentence types should form a system, so that there should be corresponding versions of a
sentence in each type.
b. similarly, the types should be mutually exclusive, i.e. there should be
C. no combinations of two sentence type markers in the same sentence; as we have noted, there
should be a conventional association with a speech act.
On the basis of rules like these, we can probably discount the negative morpheme má in table 8.1 as
a marker of sentence type in Somali. Negation co-occurs with declarative and interrogative
sentences, thus breaking rule 8.38b. The decisions are more difficult with the optative and potential
markers in table 8.1. These occur in a regular correspondence with interrogative and other
sentences but do not co-occur with them: no sentences are optative and interrogative, potential
and declarative, and so on. Thus they seem to pass rules 8.38a and b. When it comes to 8.38c, the
optative does seem a likely candidate for a sentence type because it is conventionally associated
with wishes. However, the potential is a little more problematic: the type seems to pass our rules
8.38a and b since it doesn't co-occur with other markers; but note that there is no negative potential
form.
thank you