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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.
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