A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts
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Is There an Illocutionary Act of Assertion?
English Studies at NBU, 2015 ISSN 2367-5705 (Print) Vol. 1, Issue 2, 71-84 www.esnbu.org IS THERE AN ILLOCUTIONARY ACT OF ASSERTION? Mariya Chankova South-West University, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria Abstract This contribution analyzes Cappelen’s No-Assertion view arguing that, although appealing, the No-Assertion view is based on a questionable premise, namely, that assertions are sayings. Austin’s notions of locution and saying are examined, in order to show that illocutionary acts concern aspects not covered by either of the previous two terms. Following a reconstructed definition of illocutionary act from Austin’s writings, I suggest that assertion is an illocutionary act, in that it takes effect after it is taken up by a hearer. I further suggest that in this respect the game analogy fails with regard to assertion, since no rules of the constitutive kind or norms can intrinsically define this act. This proposal is based on the idea that illocutionary act analysis should dispose of any preoccupations with propositions. It argues that expressing propositions was not originally and should not be at the core of speech act theoretic problematic. Key words: assertion, illocutionary act, proposition Article history: Received: 13 November 2015; Reviewed: 28 November 2015; Revised: 30 November 2015; Accepted: 21 December 2015; Published: 31 December 2015 Mariya Chankova, PhD, is Chief Assistant Professor in French and English at the South-West University, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. She teaches courses in French linguistics and translation and English punctuation and orthography and pragmatics. Her research interests include pragmatics, with special emphasis on speech act theory, implicit, conversational implicature, meaning generation, discourse analysis, rhetoric, philosophy of language, multimedia environment and communication, plagiarism, and French translation. -
A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts
----JOHN R. SEARLE----- - A TAXONOMY ()II' rr.r.oCO'l'IONi\HY i\C:TS a prcdictiou, and ouc a promise? 111 order t:o develop higher order ge 11 · era, we must first know how the species promise, prcclictio11, report, etc., differ one from another. When one attempts to answer that ques A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts tion one discovers that there are several quite different principles of distinction; that is, there are different kinds of differences that enable us to say that the force of this utterance is different from the force of that utterance. For this reason the metaphor of force in the expression "illocutionary force" is misleading since it suggests that different illo I. Introduction cutionary forces occupy different positions on a single continuum of The primary purpose of this paper is to develop a reasoned classifica force. What is actually the case is that there are several distinct criss tion of illocutionary acts into certain basic categories or types. It is to crossing continua. A related source of confusion is that we are inclined answer the question: How many kinds of illocutionary acts are there? to confuse illocutionary verbs with types of illocutionary acts. We are Since any such attempt to develop a taxonomy must take into account inclined, for example, to think that where we have two nonsynonymous Austin's classification of illocutionary acts into his five basic categories illocutionary verbs they must necessarily mark two different kinds of il of verdictive, expositive, exercitive, behabitive, and commissive, a second locutionary acts. In what follows, I shall try to keep a clear distinction purpose of this paper is to assess Austin's classification to show in what between illocutionary verbs and illocutionary acts. -
How to Read Austin
Pragmatics 17:3.461-473 (2007) International Pragmatics Association HOW TO READ AUSTIN Marina Sbisà Abstract The goal of this paper is a reassessment of the contributions provided by John L. Austin’s book “How to Do Things with Words” to pragmatics. It discusses some assumptions belonging to the received reading of the volume, as regards its aim and structure, the conceptions of illocution and of perlocution, and the alleged exclusion of “non-seriousness”. Against the received reading, it is argued that “How to Do Things with Words” is structured as a proof by contradiction of the claim that all speech should be considered as action, that in illocution a major role is played by the conventionality of effects, that perlocution presupposes a conception of action as responsibility, and that Austin had reasons not to deal with “non- seriousness” in detail, albeit recognizing the issue as relevant to the study of the uses of language. In the conclusions, the tenets attributed to Austin are neither crtiticized nor defended, but an attempt is made to say what are their implications for research into language use and for philosophy. Keywords: J.L. Austin; Illocutionary act; Perlocutionary act; Convention; Action. 1. Four assumptions to be disputed In this paper I consider what contributions are offered to pragmatics (in a broad sense, ranging from philosophy to interdisciplinary research into language use) by John L. Austin’s famous booklet “How to Do Things with Words” (1962) It might seem the question is otiose: Everybody who has ever been concerned with pragmatics knows that “How to Do Things with Words” (henceforth: HTW) proposes first the performative/constative distinction, then the distinction between meaning and force and the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. -
Commanding the Swedish Roads
COMMANDING THE SWEDISH ROADS NON-VERBAL PERFORMATIVES IN THE GRAMMAR OF ROAD SIGNS by Ottilia Andersson Undergraduate Thesis (15 ECTS), Autumn 2020 Supervisors: Michael Dunn and Jan-Ola Östman Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philology Uppsala University This page is intentionally left blank. Acknowledgements I wish to express my sincere appreciation to Michael Dunn, my ever so encouraging supervisor. Without his initial and continuous belief in my idea, this project would still be an embryo. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Jan-Ola Östman, whose spiritual support and academic guidance I simply could not have managed without. A warm thank you to my friends and family who, for the last couple of months, have endured (too) many conversations on road signs. And thank you Oda, who introduced me to J. L. Austin and his ideas. iii Abstract Road signs form a non-verbal semiotic system – by many encountered on a daily basis – that dictates the actions of the users of the road, in order to create a safe and efficient traffic environment. It is clear that road signs are not just ‘saying’ things but ‘doing’ something. This study examines the commanding and performative aspects of a set of Swedish road signs. The first part of the analysis is a detailed investigation of (the ‘grammar’ of) the warning sign, drawing on a theoretical framework of semiotics and Grice’s cooperative principle. The second part investigates the speech act status of warning signs, priority signs and prohibitory signs, by applying Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts. -
Not All Attitudes Are Propositional Alex Grzankowski Abstract Most
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers Not All Attitudes Are Propositional! Alex Grzankowski! ! Abstract! !Most contemporary philosophical discussions of intentionality start and end with a treatment of the propositional attitudes. In fact, many theorists hold (tacitly if not explicitly) that all attitudes are propositional attitudes. Our folk-psychological ascriptions suggest, however, that there are non-propositional attitudes: I like Sally, my brother fears snakes, everyone loves my grandmother, and Rush Limbaugh hates Obama. I argue that things are as they appear: there are non-propositional attitudes. More specifically, I argue that there are attitudes that relate individuals to non-propositional objects and do so not in virtue of relating them to propositions. I reach this conclusion by not only showing that attempted analyses of apparently non-propositional attitudes in terms of the propositional fail, but that some non-propositional attitudes don’t even supervene on propositional attitudes. If this is correct, then the common discussions of intentionality that address only propositional attitudes are incomplete and those who hold that all intentional states are propositional are mistaken.! ! No doubt, the flora and fauna of psychology have proliferated vastly, and surprising mental processes are postulated right and left. Nevertheless, at the heart of the picture, the fundamental explicandum, is the organism and its propositional attitudes: what it believes, what it learns, what it wants and fears, what it perceives to be the case. ! !Fodor (1975: 198)! ! Propositionalism! !Philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to propositional attitudes. In fact, theorists interested in intentional states have focused almost exclusively on them, some even explicitly maintaining that all intentional states are propositional attitudes. -
What Is a Speech Act? 1 2
WHAT IS A SPEECH ACT? 1 2 What is a Speech Act? John Searle I. Introduction n a typical speech situation involving a speaker, a hearer, and an utterance by the speaker, there are many kinds of acts associated with Ithe speaker’s utterance. The speaker will characteristically have moved his jaw and tongue and made noises. In addition, he will characteristically have performed some acts within the class which includes informing or irritating or boring his hearers; he will further characteristically have performed acts within the class which includes referring to Kennedy or Khrushchev or the North Pole; and he will also have performed acts within the class which includes making statements, asking questions, issuing commands, giving reports, greeting, and warning. The members of this last class are what Austin1 called illocutionary acts and it is with this class that I shall be concerned in this paper, so the paper might have been called ‘What is an Illocutionary Act?’ I do not attempt to defi ne the expression ‘illocutionary act’, although if my analysis of a particular illocutionary act succeeds it may provide the basis for a defi nition. Some of the English verbs and verb phrases associated with illocutionary acts are: state, assert, describe, warn, remark, comment, command, order, request, criticize, apologize, censure, approve, welcome, promise, express approval, and express regret. Austin claimed that there were over a thousand such expressions in English. By way of introduction, perhaps I can say why I think it is of interest and importance in the philosophy of language to study speech acts, or, as they are sometimes called, language acts or linguistic acts. -
"Sorry!" Remarks on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Apology
"Sorry!" Remarks on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Apology John Partridge University of Kent, Canterbury The Fillmore/McCawley model explicit performative "I apologise" central form for apologies REQUEST [FORGIVE] 1) I apologise for strangling your hamster Are all apologies requests for forgiveness? Variation in type, implicature and expression,within and across languages and cultures. The choice of form has implications for meaning and function. Austin on apologies Apologies: "Behabitives," "... include the notion of reaction to other people's behaviour and fortunes, and of attitudes to someone else's past conduct or imminent conduct.“ BUT An apology is not a reaction, attitude or expression to another person's behaviour or conduct, but to one's own. apologise only member of the behabitive class which reflects speaker-, not hearer-behaviour in its complement. Time reference and fit Typically, apologies refer to past behaviour presupposed, not future behaviour or present mental states asserted; "pre-emptive apologies," e.g. "I'm afraid (that)," "I fear (that)" or "Excuse me, (but)" pseudo- apologies word-to-world direction of fit, "real" apologies have no direction of fit. Searle and Fraser on apologies Searle: "Expressives“ “The illocutionary point (i.e. specific perlocutionary goal of this class is to express the psychological state specified in the sincerity condition about a state of affairs specified in the propositional content” Fraser: "An apology expresses speaker regret at an earlier act." Psychological dimension for successful congratulation 3)Congratulation propositional Some event, act, etc. E related to content H preparatory E is in H's interest and S believes E is in H's interest sincerity S is pleased at E essential Counts as an expression of pleasure at E "Congratulate" is similar to "thank" in expressing its own sincerity condition. -
Deconstructing Exclamations. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 2008, Vol. 7
Cat.Jour.Ling. 7 001-203:Cat.Jour.Ling. 10/10/08 17:23 Página 41 Catalan Journal of Linguistics 7, 2008 41-90 Deconstructing Exclamations* Elena Castroviejo Miró J.W. Goethe Universität-Frankfurt [email protected] Abstract While it is still not widely accepted that exclamatives are a clause type, exclamations are intu- itively considered a speech act comparable to assertions and questions. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the notion of exclamation. In particular, I compare the pragmatic properties of wh- exclamatives with the discourse distribution of other so-called exclamations and argue that they do not have a uniform way to update the Common Ground; by using a series of tests, I show that the sole thing they have in common is an emphatic intonation and a non-neutral attitude on the part of the speaker. Key words: exclamations, exclamative sentences, speech acts, Common Ground. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 5. Concluding remarks 2. Theoretical background 6. Further research 3. Wh-exclamatives: the control group References 4. Exclamations 1. Introduction Usually, the terms exclamative and exclamation are used sloppily to refer to the same kind of phenomenon. Sometimes, though, they are meant to refer to two dif- ferent phenomena; namely, an exclamative is a syntactic construction and an excla- mation is a pragmatic construction whose role is to express the speaker’s feelings. However, even if we agree that this is a meaningful distinction, the term exclama- tion remains a sloppy concept. That is, it seems reasonable to assume that wh-exclamatives are used to perform exclamations, but it is not clear what these * I truly appreciate the comments and suggestions of Xavier Villalba. -
Uptake and Conventionality in Illocutions
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 5.1 (2009) / Special Issue on Speech Actions : 33-52 DOI 10.2478/v10016-009-0003-0 Marina Sbisà ∗ University of Trieste UPTAKE AND CONVENTIONALITY IN ILLOCUTION Abstract The aim of this paper is to put forward a new way of conceiving of the conventionality of illocutionary acts, grounded in a new look at Austin’s original ideas. While the indispensability of uptake has correctly been deemed to be a hallmark of illocution, it has also been taken as evidence of the intention-based nature of illocutionary acts as opposed to their alleged conventionality. After discussing the readings of the “securing of uptake” offered by Strawson and Searle and commenting on the consequently established divide between “communicative” and conventional speech acts, I claim that illocutionary acts are conventional, first of all, because they have conventional effects. I show that Austin took such effects to be essential to illocution and argue that the bringing about of conventional effects is bound up with the indispensability of uptake. Keywords illocutionary act, uptake, convention, Austin, Strawson 1. Premise One of the classical problems in speech act theory is whether, and if so, how illocutionary acts are conventional. This paper addresses this problem and claims that the conventionality of illocutionary acts resides, first of all, in the conventional status of the effects they bring about. This amounts to a change in perspective, since the conventionality of illocutionary acts has traditionally been traced back to ∗ Department of Philosophy, University of Trieste, Androna Campo Marzio 10, 34123 Trieste, Italy e-mail: [email protected] 34 Marina Sbisà Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution the conventionality of the means by which they are performed. -
A Unified Theory of Mind-Brain Relationship: Is It Possible?
Open Journal of Philosophy 2013. Vol.3, No.4, 443-450 Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2013.34065 A Unified Theory of Mind-Brain Relationship: Is It Possible? Shashidhar Belbase College of Education, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA Email: [email protected], [email protected] Received May 11th, 2013; revised June 11th, 2013; accepted June 18th, 2013 Copyright © 2013 Shashidhar Belbase. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The mind-body relationship has vexed philosophers of mind for quite a long time. Different theories of mind have offered different points of view about the interaction between the two, but none of them seem free of ambiguities and questions. This paper attempts to use a mathematical model for mind-body rela- tionship. The model may generate some questions to think about this relationship from the viewpoint of operator theory. Keywords: Philosophy of Mind; Unified Theory of Mind; Operator Theory Introduction non-physical. According to this theory, the mind is non-physi- cal, mental substance and the body is physical, corporeal sub- This paper argues for possibility of a mathematical model of stance. The body and mind exist separately and have distinct operator theory of mind-body relationship as a unified theory of features with distinct properties (Robinson, 2012). Therefore, mind. At first, I would like to briefly review the existing theo- “dualism assumes two fundamental, non-reducible, realities: ries of mind-body interrelation. -
The Mind–Body Problem: an Overview
The Mind–Body Problem: An Overview Chapter 1 The Mind–Body Problem: An Overview Kirk Ludwig I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is. Walt Whitman 1.1 Introduction Understanding the place of thought and feeling in the natural world is central to that general comprehension of nature, as well as that special self-understanding, which are the primary goals of science and philosophy. The general form of the project, which has exercised scientists and philosophers since the ancient world, is given by the question, ‘What is the relation, in general, between mental and physical phenomena?’ There is no settled agreement on the correct answer. This is the single most important gap in our understanding of the natural world. The trouble is that the question presents us with a problem: each possible answer to it has consequences that appear unacceptable. This problem has traditionally gone under the heading ‘The Mind–Body Problem.’1 My primary aim in this chapter is to explain in what this traditional mind–body problem consists, what its possible solutions are, and what obstacles lie in the way of a resolution. The discussion will develop in two phases. The first phase, sections 1.2–1.4, will be concerned to get clearer about the import of our initial question as a precondition of developing an account of possible responses to it. The second phase, sections 1.5–1.6, explains how a problem arises in our attempts to answer the question we have characterized, and surveys the various solutions that can be and have been offered. -
Computing the Meaning of the Assertive Speech Act by a Software Agent
Nolan, Brian (2017) Computing the meaning of the assertive speech act by a software agent. Journal of Computer-Assisted Linguistic Research 1: 20-39. Computing the meaning of the assertive speech act by a software agent Brian Nolan Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Dublin, Ireland [email protected] Received: 2 March 2017 / Accepted: 30 April 2017 / Published: 19 June 2017 Abstract This paper examines the nature of the assertive speech act of Irish. We examine the syntactical constructional form of the assertive to identify its constructional signature. We consider the speech act as a construction whose meaning as an utterance depends on the framing situation and context, along with the common ground of the interlocutors. We identify how the assertive speech act is formalised to make it computer tractable for a software agent to compute its meaning, taking into account the contribution of situation, context and a dynamic common ground. Belief, desire and intention play a role in what is meant as against what is said. The nature of knowledge, and how it informs common ground, is explored along with the relationship between knowledge and language. Computing the meaning of a speech act in the situation requires us to consider the level of the interaction of all these dimensions. We argue that the contribution of lexicon and grammar, with the recognition of belief, desire and intentions in the situation type and associated illocutionary force, sociocultural conventions of the interlocutors along with their respective general and cultural knowledge, their common ground and other sources of contextual information are all important for representing meaning in communication.