SPEECH ACT THEORY AND PRAGMATICS SPEECH ACT THEORY AND PRAGMATICS Edited by JOHN R. SEARLE University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A. FERENC KIEFER Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris and MANFRED BIERWISCH Academy of Sciences of the G.D.R., Berlin D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY DORDRECHT: HOLLAND I BOSTON : U .S.A. LONDON: ENGLAND library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Speech act theory and pragmatics. (Synthese language library; v. l0) Includes bibliographies and indexes. 1. Speech acts (Linguistics)-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Semiotics-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Searle, John R. II. Kiefer, Ferenc. III. Bierwisch, Manfred. IV. Series. P9S.SS .S63 412 79-26973 ISBN-13; 978-90-277-1045-1 e-ISBN-13 : 978-94-009-8964-1 DOl : 10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S .A. and Canada by Kluwer Boston Inc., Lincoln Building, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. D. Reidel Publishing Company is a member of the Kluwer Group. All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1980 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. T ABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION vii MANFRED BIERWISCH / Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force 1 STEVEN DAVIS / Perlocutions 37 GILLES FAUCONNIER / Pragmatic Entailment and Questions 57 ROLAND R. HAUSSER / Surface Compositionality and the Semantics of Mood 71 FERENC KIEFER / Yes-No Questions as Wh-Questions 97 HANS-HEINRICH LIEB / Syntactic Meanings 121 WOLFGANG MOTSCH / Situational Context and Illocutionary Force 155 ROLAND POSNER / Semantics and Pragmatics of Sentence Connec- tives in Natural Language 169 FRAN<;OIS RltcANATI / Some Remarks on Explicit Performatives, Indirect Speech Acts, Locutionary Meaning and Truth-Value 205 JOHN R. SEARLE / The Background of Meaning 221 PETR SGALL / Towards a Pragmatically Based Theory of Meaning 233 DANIEL V ANDERVEKEN / Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating Speech Acts 247 ZENO VENDLER / Telling the Facts 273 DIETER WUNDERLICH / Methodological Remarks on Speech Act Theory 291 INDEX OF NAMES 313 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 315 INTRODUCTION In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica­ tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts. Illocu­ tionary acts such as stating are often directed at or done for the purpose of achieving perlocutionary effects such as convincing or persuading, but it has seemed crucial to the theorists of speech acts, unlike earlier behavioristic the­ orists of language, to distinguish the illocutionary act, which is a speech act proper, from the achievement of the perlocutionary effect, which mayor may not be achieved by specifically linguistic means. Furthermore, within the illocu­ tionary act there are certain subsidiary propositional acts such as referring to an object, or expressing the proposition that such and such. It has seemed necessary to speech act theorists to make the distinction between propositional and illocutionary acts because the same reference or the same expression of a proposition can occur in different illocutionary acts. Thus, for example, in a statement about President Carter or in a question about President Carter, the same act of reference to President Carter is made even though the total illocutionary acts are different. Also, in the sequence of utterances, "Please vii J. R. Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch (eds.), Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, vii-xii. Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. viii INTRODUCTION leave the room", "You will leave the room", and "Will you leave the room?" the same proposition, that you will leave the room, is expressed in the per­ formance of three different illocutionary acts, one a request, one a prediction, and one a question. This last distinction between the illocutionary act and the propositional act has suggested to most theorists who write about speech acts that there is a typical logical form of the illocutionary act whereby it has a propositional content (P) and that propositional content is presented with a certain illocutionary force F, giving the total act the structure F(P). Finally, in the theory of speech acts there is a customary distinction between direct speech acts, where the speaker says what he means, and indirect speech acts where he means something more than what he says. For example in a standard dinner table situation when a speaker says "Can you pass the salt?" he per­ forms the direct speech act of asking whether the hearer can pass the salt but normally also the indirect speech act of requesting the hearer to pass the salt. Most of the standard authors on the subject of speech acts would accept something like the above distinctions, but when it comes to the notion of pragmatics, the situation is much more confused. "Pragmatics" is one of those words ("societal" and "cognitive" are others) that give the impression that something quite specific and technical is being talked about, when often in fact it has no clear meaning. The motivation for introducing this term, which was done by Charles Morris and later Rudolf Carnap, was to distinguish pragmatics from syntax [or "syntactics"] and semantics. According to Morris's earliest formulation of this distinction (1938), syntactics studies "the formal relations of signs to one another". Semantics studies "the rela­ tions of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable." And pragmatics studies "the relations of signs to interpreters". But this distinction between pragmatics and semantics is very unsatisfactory. For example, taken strictly, the above defmitions would have the consequence that pragmatics is a branch of semantics, since signs are clearly "applicable" to interpreters. Morris later modified this defmition, and redefmed pragmatics as "that branch of semiotics which studies the origins, the uses, and the effects of signs" (1946). Camap (1942), following Morris's earlier position, gave the following defmition, which has proved influential to subsequent authors: If, in an investigation, explicit reference is made to the speaker, or to put it in more gen­ eral terms, to the user of the language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics ... If we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their de­ signata, we are in the field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designata also and analyze only the relations between the expressions, we are in [logical] syntax. The whole science of language, consisting of the three parts mentioned, is called "semiotics". INTRODUCTION ix With the background of these early statements (or confusions) in Morris and Carnap, it is now possible to distinguish at least three different more or less traditional attitudes to "pragmatics". They are related to the development of formal philosophy, linguistic semantics, and ordinary language philosophy. The differences among these attitudes, growing out of their respective tradi­ tions and orientations, are mainly determined by different conceptions of the nature of meaning, yielding different views about the relation between seman­ tics and pragmatics. The key notions in these different accounts of meaning are the denotation, sense, and use oflinguistic expressions. The first tradition, the direct descendant of Carnap's work, is that of for­ mal philosophy and logic, as exemplified by such authors as Montague, Lewis, and Cresswell. According to this view, language is an interpreted formal sys­ tem, where the interpretation in question assigns a denotation to each expres­ sion belonging to the system. On this account, the meaning of an expression is explained in terms of the things it denotes. Thus a sentence like "It is rain­ ing"