Speech acts

In most of the sentences we have looked at so far, language has been used to make statements or to comment upon the world in some way. But we use language for a range of other purposes too, for example to get people to do things (‘Get out of my sight!’; ‘Open fire!’). Some utterances, in fact, seem to constitute actions in themselves:

1 I bet you £10 that Australia beat England.

2 I expect you to be home by 10 pm.

3 I dare you to walk out without paying.

4 I declare you husband and wife.

5 I order you to pay a fine of £5,000.

The properties and behavior of such sentences were first explored in J. L. Austin’s beguilingly titled book How to do Things with Words, first published in 1962, which starts by pointing out that there is a difference between verbs of stating, or constatives, and performative verbs, like those underlined above, by which a speech act is performed. Performatives share a number of properties: they are receptive, for example, to use of the simple present tense with present meaning, which is uncommon in English in declarative sentences (compare ‘I order you to leave this minute’ with ‘?I read a book this minute’); many of them take ‘to + infinitive’ or ‘for + Vb + ing’ complements (‘I order/warn/urge/dare you to X’, ‘I apologize/excuse you/ pardon you for Xing’) and, perhaps most significantly of all, they all pass the ‘hereby’ test: the adverb ‘hereby’ can be placed before a performative verb but not a constative one (‘I hereby declare you husband and wife’ cf. ‘?I hereby turn the television on’).

As Austin’s book continues, however, the distinction between performative and non-performative utterances is gradually undermined, so that all utterances become viewed as speech acts in some sense. In Austin’s terms, all utterances have a particular ‘force’. ‘Force’, however, is not something that can be analyzed in terms of truth-conditions. As Levinson (1983: 245) points out, the same propositional content (that the interlocutor is to go home, in the examples below) can be associated with a range of very different speech acts:

1 I predict that you will go home.

2 Go home!

3 Are you going to go home?

4 I advise you to go home.

Austin suggests that there are three kinds of force, associated with the nature of the speech act performed (see Levinson 1983: 236):

locutionary act – uttering a sentence with a determinate sense and reference

illocutionary act – uttering a sentence which performs an action (advising, promising, declaring, etc.) by virtue of the conventional force associated with it.

perlocutionary act – the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of the utterance. (Note that the perlocution performed may well not be the one speaker intended or wished.)

The distinction between the second and third type may be difficult to draw in practice. Austin offers the following concrete example:

Shoot her!

Here, he suggests, the utterance may have the illocutionary force of ordering, urging or advising the addressee to shoot someone, but the perlocutionary force of persuading, forcing or frightening the addressee into shooting her (and also of frightening the intended victim). The perlocutionary force is the most obviously context-dependent aspect of the speech act, the illocutionary force being often conventionalized within the sentence type. In the above example, the illocutionary force of ordering is conventionally associated with a particular sentence type (imperative), but direct imperatives are often avoided in practice, for reasons we explore below, in favor of indirect speech acts. For example, instead of saying ‘Shut the door!’ one might use an interrogative form (‘Can/will you shut the door?’), or even a superficially declarative statement (‘Brr! It’s cold in here!’) in the hope that the interlocutor will take the hint.