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THE BASICS OF SPEECH ACT THEORY

INTRODUCTION

Public life and people’s private lives consist of an array of various situations and
events which “take a linguistic form” (Halliday 1978). Practically all social gatherings,
official ceremonies and rites are associated with speech situations / speech events /
speech acts, speech acts being minimal elements in this sequence. Offers and demands,
agreements and promises, greetings and commands, warnings and refusals, curses and
apologies are only a few examples of speech acts we perform daily. “It would not be an
exaggeration to say that … life can be conceived as a gigantic network of speech acts”
(Wierzbicka 1987:3) bridged together into speech events. Negotiations, introductions,
invitations, bargainings, etc are typical complex speech events.

A TRIPLE NATURE OF SPEECH ACTS

The British philosopher John Austin was the first to point out that in uttering a
sentence we can do things as well as say things. His fundamental insight was that an
utterance can be used to perform an act and accomplish a goal. Before Austin,
philosophers held that sentences were used simply to say things.
According to Austin, each speech act has at least three facets to it: a locutionary act,
an illocutionary act, and a perlocutionary act.
 A locutionary act is the act of simply uttering a sentence from a language; it is an act
of producing a meaningful expression as such. It contains the speaker’s verbalized
message and describes what the speaker says. It involves three components:
1. a phonetic act of “uttering certain noises” – sounds;
2. a phatic act of constructing a particular sentence in a particular language: uttering
certain words belonging to a certain vocabulary, in a certain grammar, with a
certain intonation;
3. a rhetic act of contextualization of a certain sense and reference which are
equivalent to some meaning (referring and predication).
Typically, it is the act of using a referring expression and a predicating expression to
express a proposition. (You should stop smoking – the referring expression is you and
the predicating expression is stop smoking.
 An illocutionary act is what the speaker does in uttering a sentence. It indicates the
speaker’s purpose in saying smth, specifying in what way s/he is using the locution.
These acts include stating, requesting, questioning, promising, apologizing,
appointing, answering questions, announcing an intention, making a criticism, making
an identification, making predictions, issuing commands, warning, etc. The
illocutionary act is sometimes called the illocutionary force of the utterance.
 A perlocutionary act produces sequential effects on the feelings, thoughts, or actions
of hearers.
The following demonstrates the distinct nature of each type of act:
Locutionary act: He said to me, “Don’t go there.”
Illocutionary act: He asked me not to go there.
He advised me not to go there.
He protested against my going
there.