Speech Act theory

Philosophers who give serious thought to language have been traditionally concerned with truth and
falsehood of utterance. It has been long believed that humans are “rational” beings that can explain the
meaning of language by mathematical logic. It is John Langshaw Austin’s How to Do Things with Words
(1962) that sheds light on the “use” aspect of language and shifts philosophical arguments more to
ordinal language.

OVERVIEW OF SPEECH ACT THEORY

The underlying theme behind Austin’s philosophy is that a statement not only describes a situation or
states some facts, but also performs a certain kind of action by itself. The tradition to view a statement
as a mere description of state or fact has been pursued by a number of philosophers for a long period of
time. In this way of thinking, each statement itself should hold either truth or falsehood. For instance,
the sentence “You have a wonderful smile” is in one sense either true or false in light of the real world,
namely whether the person really has a wonderful smile or not. Yet, Austin points out that this
utterance is more than mere description and statement: It does things on its own. The sentence “You
have a wonderful smile” can function depending on contexts as praise, telling irony, or even asking for
money in a certain situation. To start with, Austin suspects that philosophers had been neglecting the
utterance-as-action aspect, which he categorizes as “performative sentence” or “performative
utterance.” Austin presents some cases in which an utterance functions as action: admitting to accept a
woman as one’s wife by saying, “yes, I do,” in the wedding ceremony; or naming a ship the Queen
Elizabeth by saying, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth ,” with a bottle smashed against the stem.
Proposing that uttering a sentence includes actually doing things, Austin makes a distinction between
constative and performative: The former is an utterance-as-description view and the latter is an
utterance-as-doing view. Performative utterance is not a matter of being “true” or “false,” which are
believed to be the characteristics of description and statement, according to Austin (1962). To suggest
this point, Austin quotes the wedding example again and insists that “here we should say that in saying
these words we are doing something—namely, marrying, rather than reporting

something, namely that we are marrying” (p. 13). Instead of the true-false dichotomy, Austin introduces
“the doctrine of the Infelicities,” defined as “the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong on the
occasion of such utterances” (p. 14, italics removed). In order to explain the doctrine of the infelicities,
Austin first classifies infelicities into two features. The first category is “misfires.” Misfires are infelicitous
cases in which an act is purported but it is of no effect. Among misfires, Austin separates
“misinvocations” from “misexecutions.” In misinvocations, the purported act is not allowed. In other
words, conventions of that performed act must exist. An example case of misinvocation is
“misapplication,” which is an act, for instance, of christening a penguin—there is no convention of
christening animals. While misinvocations do not possess their conventions, misexecutions do have their
conventions: However, some mistakes occur in the process of its execution and lead to the failure of the
execution. “Flaw” is one type of misexecution, an inappropriate execution in which, e.g., one utters “my
house” when he or she actually possesses two houses. “Hitches” is another type, an incomplete, rather
than inappropriate, execution in which a woman announces her intention not to marry her fiancé during
her wedding ceremony. The other category of the doctrine of the infelicities, according to Austin (1962),
is “abuses.” Compared to misfires, abuses are concerned with a speaker’s feeling, intention, and
continuous action. One example is a case in which one says, “I congratulate you,” despite feeling
unhappy or unpleasant. Another example is that when one says, “I promise to show up at five,” he or
she actually needs to show up at five. Here exist “insincerity,” “infraction,” and “beach.”

As an alternative to the study on meaning, Austin (1962) calls for “the doctrine of ‘illocutionary forces’”
(p. 99), that focuses on the performative linguistic function in which speech is regarded as action.
Naming it in this way, Austin insists on the need to group speech acts into three ways. The first category
is a locutionary act. This is an act of constructing an utterance by following grammars and vocalizing the
sentence. For example, if a person says to you, “You can’t do that,” the locutionary act is to construct a
sentence that literally means that you cannot do that by making relevant physical sounds. It is followed
by the second category, an illocutionary act. In this act, one actually performs an act in uttering the
sentence. In the same example, the illocutionary act is to prohibit you from doing that. The third
category is a perlocutionary act, which one tries to accomplish by uttering it. That is, by saying the
sentence, he stopped you from doing that.

Among locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, Austin (1962) especially focuses on the
importance of illocution and extends his analysis by making a distinction between illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts: “illocutionary acts are conventional acts: perlocutionary acts are not conventional”
(p. 120). In order to perform an illocutionary act, the speaker must rely on the socially accepted
convention without which the speaker cannot inspire a social force into his or her utterance. In other
words, it is conventional “in the sense that at least it could be made explicit by the performative
formula” (p. 103). On the other hand, a perlocutionary act is an effect of the illocutionary act. “The
consequential effects of perlocutions are really consequences, which do not include such conventional
effects as, for example, the speaker’s being committed by his [ sic ] promise (which comes into the
illocutionary act)” (p. 102). This distinction is reflected in whether a person performs an act “in” saying
or “by” saying. In an illocutionary act, “ In saying I would shoot him I was threatening him,” and in a
perlocutionary act, “ By saying I would shoot him I alarmed him” (p. 121). In the end, Austin reaches the
bold conclusion that a description of situations or a statement of facts is merely one type of illocutionary
force. This means that truth and falsehood, which had been long argued by traditional philosophers, are
a form of language to represent general views in order to provide such an evaluation that something is
right, wrong, adequate, or inadequate, with intentions and purposes, for audiences in specific situations.
That is to say, truth and falsehood are concerned with not only meanings of words but also, more
importantly, what kinds of acts are performed in what kinds of situations. To conclude, Austin (1962)
presents five general classes of illocutionary forces of utterances, including verdictives, exercitives,
commissives, behabitives, and expositives. Verdictives can be observed when juries, mediators, or
judges, for instance, are giving a verdict. They also include “estimate, reckoning, or appraisal” (p. 150).
Exercitives are related to executions of right, authority, and influence, such as order or designate.
Commissives are those by which the speaker is obliged to do some acts by uttering the sentence, e.g.,
promise or intend. Behabitives are concerned with attitudes and social behaviors, such as congratulate
or curse. Expositives clarify the way utterances fit the proceedings of conversation or arguments,
including describe, accept, or explain. The main theses explained above can be identified in other
writings by Austin (1979a). The article, Performative Utterances (Austin, 1979b), directly deals with the
issue of performatives and poses questions toward the traditional philosophical tendency to focus on
descriptions. He also presents a basic form of the theory of the infelicities and its categorization. In
Other Minds , Austin (1979c) is trying to answer the epistemological question “How do we know?” from
the standpoint of the ordinary language school. It seems that this idea is the beginning of his focus on
performatives. In Ifs and Cans , Austin actually applies his way of analysis to the case of if-clause (Austin,
1979d). The sentence which contains if-clause was traditionally thought of as representing logic.
However, here Austin points out that if-clause rather relies on intention or attempt of the speaker. He
also refers to the importance of free will. Throughout these works and other writings, Austin meets
challenges from other scholars, develops his own thesis by encountering these challenges, and
establishes the solid baseline of the ordinary language school tradition, alternative to the traditional
statement-as-description approach.