INTRODUCTION 1 страница

So far we have not exploited to any significant degree the ter­minological distinction between 'sentence' and 'utterance' that was introduced in Chapter 1. Nor have we exploited the asso­ciated distinctions between Saussure's 'langue' and 'parole' and Chomsky's 'competence' and 'performance', which, as we saw in Chapter 1, need to be reformulated, as non-equivalent •dichotomies within the system—process—product trichotomy, if we are to avoid the confusion that exists in the account that is given of these technical distinctions in most textbooks.

Much of the work that has been done in formal semantics (in so far as it has been applied to the analysis of natural languages) has been based on the view that languages are sets of sentences and that sentences are used primarily, if not exclusively, to make descriptive statements. Typically, therefore, no distinction is drawn in formal semantics between sentence-meaning and prepositional (i.e., descriptive) content. This is clearly a very limited view of what a language is and (as we saw in Chapter 6) of sentence-meaning. It is a view that has been much criticized.

One of the most influential critics in recent years was the Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin (1911-60), whose ideas have been much discussed, not only by philosophers, but also by lin­guists (and representatives of many other disciplines). In this chapter, we use Austin's theory of so-called speech acts as a

8.1 Utterances 235

departure-point for the analysis of utterance-meaning that fol­lows in Chapters 9 and 10.

8.1 UTTERANCES

The term 'utterance', as was pointed out in Chapter 1, is ambig­uous as between a process-sense and a product-sense (1.6). ('Pro­cess' is here being used as a term which is broader than 'action' or 'activity': an action is a process controlled by an agent; an act is a unit of action or activity.) The term 'utterance' can be used to refer either to the process (or activity) of uttering or to the products of that process (or activity). Utterances in the first of these two senses are commonly referred to nowadays as speech acts; utterances in the second sense may be referred to - in a specialized sense of the term - as inscriptions. (The term 'inscription', which was introduced in Chapter 1, is not widely used by linguists. It must not be interpreted as being more appropriate to the written than it is to the spoken lan­guage.) It is one of my principal aims in this chapter to clarify the relation between speech acts and inscriptions and, in doing so, to develop in more detail the distinction between sentence- meaning and utterance-meaning. I will operate, as far as possi­ble, with the terms and concepts which derive from the work of J. L. Austin and are now widely employed in linguistics and related disciplines. But I shall need to add one or two distinctions of my own, in order to make more precise than Austin and his followers have done the rather complex relation that holds between speech acts and sentences. I will also introduce into the discussion points which are given less emphasis in what may be referred to as the Anglo-American tradition than they are in the typically French tradition which stems from the work of Emile Benveniste (1966, 1974).

The term 'speech act' is somewhat misleading. First of all, it might seem to be synonymous with 'act of utterance', rather than to denote - as it does (in the sense in which it tends to be used by linguists) - some particular part of the production of utterances. Second, it throws too much emphasis on that part of the production of utterances which results in their inscription in

236 Speech acts and illocutionary force

the physical medium of sound. However, since 'speech act' is now widely employed, in linguistics and philosophy, in the tech­nical sense that Austin and more particularly J. R. Searle (1969) gave to it, I will make no attempt to replace it with another more appropriate term. It must he emphasized, how­ever, that (i) 'speech act' is being used throughout in a highly specialized sense and (ii) like 'utterance', on the one hand, and 'inscription' or 'text', on the other, is intended to cover the pro­duction of both written and spoken language. Everything that is said in this chapter (and throughout this book) is intended to be consistent with what was said in Chapter 1 about competence and performance, on the one hand, and about the language-system, the use of the language-system, and the products of the use of the language-system, on the other, and to be neutral with respect to a number of differences which divide one school of linguistics from another at the present time. For example, it is neutral between generativist and non-generativist approaches to the analysis of language and languages, between cognitivism and anti-cognitivism, between functionalism and anti-functionalism, and between formalism and anti-formalism. More positively, my presentation of what has come to be called the theory of speech acts is intended to give more of the relevant philosophical background than is usually given in textbook accounts for linguists.

Austin himself never presented a fully developed theory of speech acts. The nearest he came to doing so was in the William James lectures, which were delivered at Harvard in 1955 and published, after his death, as How to Do Things With Words (1962). He had been lecturing on the same topic for some years previously in Oxford and had delivered papers relating to it as early as 1940, but did not leave behind him a fully revised and publishable manuscript of his William James lectures. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that there is no agreed and defini­tive version of his theory of speech acts. Indeed, it is not clear that Austin was even trying to construct a theory of speech acts, in the sense in which the term 'theory' is interpreted by many of those who have taken up his ideas. He belonged to the so-called ordinary-language school of philosophy, whose members tended

8.1 Utterances 237

to be suspicious of formalization and the drawing of sharp dis­tinctions.

Austin's main purpose, originally at least, was to challenge what he regarded as the descriptive fallacy: the view that the only philosophically interesting function of language was that of making true or false statements. More specifically, he was attacking the verificationist thesis, associated with logical posi­tivism: the thesis that sentences are meaningful only if they express verifiable, or falsifiable, propositions. We have already looked at verificationism in connexion with the notion of truth-conditionality (see 5.4). As we have seen, when Austin first con­cerned himself with the question, the verificationists had already had to face the objection that their criterion of meaningfulness had the effect of ruling out, not only the so-called pseudo-statements of theology and metaphysics, but also those of ethics and aesthetics. One response to this objection, it will be recalled, was to concede that sentences such as

(l)'Cannibalism is wrong' or

(2) 'Monet is a better painter than Manet'

cannot be used to make descriptive statements, but only emo­tively: i.e., to express one's feelings (see 5.5).

Another was to say that, although such sentences can be used to make true or false statements, what speakers are describing when they make such statements are their own or someone else's attitudes, rather than objective reality. \Vhat Austin did in his relatively early papers was to criticize the second of these alter­natives. He subsequently pointed out that many more of our everyday utterances are pseudo-statements than either the veri­ficationists or their opponents had realized. For example, according to Austin, if one utters the sentence

(3) 'I promise to pay you ₤5',

with the purpose of making a promise (and of communicating to one's addressee the fact that one is making a promise), one is

238 Speech acts and illocutionary force

not saying something, true or false, about one's state of mind, but committing oneself to a particular course of action.

This, in brief, is the philosophical context in which Austin first put forward his now famous distinction between constative and performative utterances. A constative utterance is, by definition, a statement-making utterance. (Austin prefers 'con­stative' to 'descriptive', because, in his view, not all true or false statements are descriptions. For simplicity of exposition in the present context, the two terms may be treated as equivalent.) Performative utterances, in contrast, are those in the production of which the speaker, or writer, performs an act of doing rather than saying.

This distinction between saying and doing (reflected in the title of Austin's Oxford lectures, 'Words and deeds') was even­tually abandoned. However, the distinction between constative and non-constative utterances, as such, was not abandoned. It is simply that, in the latest version that we have of Austin's own work, constative utterances are presented as just one class of per­formatives. Similarly, saying - in the statement-making, or assertive, sense of the verb 'say': the sense in which one says that something is or is not the case — is seen as a particular kind of doing. And, as we shall see, Austin goes into the question of say­ing and doing in considerable detail. In fact, this is what Austin's theory of speech acts, in so far as it is a theory, is all about. It is a theory of pragmatics (in the etymological sense of 'prag­matics': "the study of action, or doing").

Moreover (although Austin did not develop the implications
of this viewpoint), it is a theory of social pragmatics: a theory of
saying as doing within the framework of social institutions and
conventionr, taken for granted and accepted by the doers (or
actors). This aspect of Austin's theory has not always been
given the emphasis that it deserves.,

A second distinction which Austin draws is between explicit and primary performatives. This distinction applies, in prin­ciple, to both constative and non-constative utterances. For the present, it suffices to say that an explicit performative is one in which the utterance-inscription contains an expression which; denotes or otherwise makes explicit the kind of act that is being

8.1 Utterances 239

performed. This definition will need to be refined in several respects. As it stands, it is perhaps broader than Austin intended, and yet narrower than it ought to be. But it certainly covers all the examples that Austin and his followers have used to illustrate the class of explicit performatives. In particular, it covers non-constative utterances of sentences such as (3). Such sentences contain a so-called performative verb, and it is the occurrence of this verb, 'promise', together with the fact that it has a first-person subject and is in the simple present indicative form, which makes explicit the nature of the speech act that is being performed when the sentence is uttered in order to make a promise.

Of course, one can make a promise without doing so by utter­ing an explicit performative. For example, one can make a promise by uttering the sentence

(4) 'I will pay you ₤5'.

In this case, one will have produced what Austin refers to as a primary (i.e., non-explicit) performative. This is non-explicit, in terms of the definition given above, in that there is no expres­sion in the utterance-inscription itself (I'll pay you ₤ 5} which makes explicit the fact that it is to be taken as a promise rather than a prediction or a statement.

This will serve as a sufficient, though informal and rather imprecise, account of what Austin had in mind when he drew his distinction between explicit and primary performatives. It will be noted that it is utterances, not sentences, that are classi­fied as being constative or non-constative, and as being either explicitly performative or not. When linguists use the term 'per­formative sentence' they are usually referring to sentences such as 'I promise to pay you Ј5', which contain a so-called perfor­mative verb and are commonly uttered as explicitly non- constative utterances.

 

As will be clear from what was said about declarative and non-declarative sentences in Chapter 6, example (4) is a declarative sentence because it belongs to a class of sentences typical members of which are used characteristically to make statements. It was emphasized at that point that this does

 

 

240 Speech acts and illocutionary force

not imply that each member or any particular subclass of that class is used normally or even commonly for that purpose. Even if (3) were never used for making statements, but only for mak­ing promises, it would still be a declarative sentence by virtue of its grammatical structure. And (3) can, of course, be used (in contemporary Standard English) for making statements of var­ious kinds. There should be no need to labour this point here. But it must be borne in mind throughout this chapter.

In what follows I will make use of several of Austin's terms. But I will not always give to them exactly the same interpreta­tion as he gave them. In some instances, Austin's own interpreta­tion is far from clear; in others, it is clear enough, but controversial. There is the further problem that Austin's view of the distinction between sentences and utterances was very dif­ferent from the one that I have adopted in this book. I will there­fore reinterpret Austin's theory of speech acts in the light of this distinction.

8.2 LOCUTIONARYACTS

To perform what Austin called a locutionary act is to produce an
utterance (i.e., an utterance-inscription) with a particular form
and a more or less determinate meaning. '

Many of the utterances that we produce in everyday conver­
sation — i.e., most of the products of our locutionary acts — are
ungrammatical; some are grammatical, but elliptical (e.g., Been
here long?, Nice weather for the time of year, etc.); some are neither
grammatical nor ungrammatical; yet others, of course, are both
ungrammatical and unacceptable - resulting from so-called
performance errors: inattention, lapses of memory or malfunc­
tioning of one kind or another in the actual production of
language-signals.

Since we are deliberately restricting our attention, for the time being, to utterances that are grammatically well-formed and non-elliptical, we can temporarily ignore much of the com­plexity that a fuller discussion of locutionary acts would require. In particular, we can temporarily assume that to perform a locu- tionary act is necessarily to utter a sentence. However, it is

8.2 Locutionary acts 241

important at this point to note that two people can utter the same sentence without necessarily saying the same thing, and they can say the same thing without necessarily uttering the same sentence.

In fact, there are various ways in which one can interpret the everyday expression 'say the same thing'. Austin's theory of speech acts can be seen as addressing itself to this issue and as (partially) explicating the several senses of the verb 'say' in which saying is doing. Let us begin by noting that the following sentence is ambiguous, according to whether the verb 'say' is taken as meaning "assert" or "utter":

(5) 'John and Mary said the same thing'.

Under one interpretation, it has much the same truth-condi­tions, and therefore the same prepositional content, as

(6) 'John and Mary asserted the same proposition'.

Under the other, it may be paraphrased, in the technical meta­language that we have been building up, as

(7) 'John and Mary produced the same utterance-inscription'.

It is also worth noting that, although the word 'thing' would not normally be regarded as ambiguous, there is a striking and theo­retically important difference between one class of things and another. Propositions, as we have seen, are abstract entities of a particular kind. Utterance-inscriptions, on the other hand, have physical properties, which are identifiable by means of one or more of the senses: hearing, sight, touch, etc.

It is clear from what has been said in earlier chapters that it is possible to assert the same proposition by uttering different sen­tences. This point may now be developed further. First of all, the same proposition may be asserted (let us assume) by uttering sentences of different languages: e.g.,

 

(8) 'It is raining' (English),
(9)'Il pleut' (French),
(10) 'Es regnet' (German).

242 Speech acts and illocutionaryforce

Second, it may be asserted by uttering two sentences of the same language with the same prepositional content, such as corre­sponding actives and passives: e.g.,

'The dog bit the postman'
and

'The postman was bitten by the dog'.

Conversely, as we saw in Chapter 7, one can assert different propositions by uttering the same sentence in different contexts and by assigning different values to the referring expressions that it contains. For example,

(13) 'My friend is waiting for me'

expresses indefinitely many propositions according to the value assigned to 'my friend' and ' I ' and the time that is being referred to by the tense of the verb. We have noted, then, that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the utterance of sen­tences and the assertion of propositions.

There is also a distinction to be drawn between the utterance of sentences and the production of utterance-inscriptions. This can be shown by means of a few simple examples. Let us suppose that John says

I'll meet you at the bank
and Mary says

I'll meet you at the bank.

Or, again, let us suppose that they both say

(16) Flying planes can be dangerous.

We can readily agree that in one sense of'say', in each instance,
they have said the same thing: they have produced the same
utterance-inscription. More precisely (as we shall see presently),
they have produced tokens of the same utterance-type. Let us;
also agree that what they have uttered is, in each case, a sen-
tence. But have they both uttered the same sentence?

8.2 Locutionary acts 243

It is important to realize that we cannot answer this question without knowing not only what forms have been uttered, but also of what expressions they are forms. If bank in John's utter­ance is a form of 'bank₁)' (meaning "financial institution") and bank in Mary's is a form of 'bank₂' (meaning "sloping side of a river"), they have uttered different sentences. Similarly, if flying in John's utterance is a form of the intransitive verb 'fly' (so that 'flying planes' means roughly "planes which are flying") and flying in Mary's is a form of the corresponding transitive verb 'fly' (so that 'flying planes' means roughly "to fly planes"), they have once again uttered different sentences. Regrettably, there is a good deal of confusion in the literature relating to the point that has just been made, deriving from the fact that sen­tences were originally defined (untraditionally) by generative grammarians as strings of forms which may or may not have the same grammatical structure. Here and throughout, I have adopted a more traditional view of sentences.

The fact that one can produce the same utterance-inscription without having uttered the same sentence is obscured in a good deal of recent work in se nantics and pragmatics by the looseness with which the terms 'sentence' and 'utterance' are employed. It is arguable that Austin, too, fell victim to the failure to draw a sufficiently sharp distinction between sentences and utter­ances. But he was certainly aware of the point that has just been illustrated; and he had a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of the relation between sentences and utterances than many of his followers appear to have. For the analysis that he himself gives of locutionary acts, unclear though it is in cer­tain respects and technically defective in others, certainly depends upon his recognition of the fact that phonetically identi­cal utterances can differ in terms of their constituent expressions and their grammatical structure.

This leads us to an additional point: phonetic identity is not a necessary condition of the identity of utterances. If we ask Mary to repeat John's utterance of (14), we do not expect her to mimic his voice-quality or to reproduce such paralinguistic features as rhythm and tempo. We do not even expect her to imi­tate John's accent, though it might differ strikingly from her

244 Speech acts and illocutionary force

own. For example, if John is a working-class Londoner with a Cockney accent and Mary is an upper-class lady from New Eng­land, they will pronounce I'll meet you at the bank and almost every other potential utterance of English in characteristically different ways. And yet in many cases, if not all, pairs of phoneti­cally distinct utterance-inscriptions will be identified by native speakers as tokens of the same type.

This shows that phonetic identity is not a necessary condition of the type/token identity of utterance-inscriptions. It also illus­trates the point that the type/token identity of utterances is, up to a point, theory-independent: it can be established in particu­lar instances without reference to one theory of language-structure rather than another. But theory-independence, in this sense, breaks down in respect of the intonation-contour of utter­ances. It simply is not clear, in everyday life, whether two intona-tionally distinct pronunciations of I'll meet you at the bank would count as tokens of the same type. In both cases there is room for debate as to whether stress and intonation are relevant or not. For simplicity of exposition, however, I will here take the view that for two people to produce the same utterance-inscriptions, it is sufficient for them to utter what they and others will recognize as the same string of forms, regardless of the intonation-contour and stress-pattern that are superimposed upon it. And I will take the same view as far as sentences are concerned.

For example, if John says

((17) It's raining

with falling intonation and a neutral stress-pattern, whereas Mary says

(18) It's raining

with emphatic stress and rising intonation on the form raining, I
will declare them, not only to have produced the same
utterance-inscription, but also to have uttered the same
sentence:

(19) 'It is raining'.

8.2 Locutionary acts 245

I also count the contraction of it is to it's, and all similar phenom­ena, as irrelevant to the type/token identity of utterance-inscriptions. This is not so much a matter of fact as of theor­etical and methodological decision. Many linguists would disagree, on theoretical grounds, with the view that I have taken here. But few linguists, so far, have given serious attention to the question; and much of what appears to be genuine disagreement might turn out to be purely terminological.

We can now split the performance of a locutionary act into two logically independent parts: (i) the production of an inscrip­tion in some appropriate physical medium; and (ii) the construc­tion of such and such a sentence. They are logically independent, because the same inscription can be associated with two or more quite different sentences and, conversely, the same sentence can be associated with two or more quite different inscriptions. Using Austin's terms, we can say that a locutionary act is the product of (i) a phonic act of producing an inscription (in the phonic medium of sound); and (ii) a phatic act of con­structing a particular sentence in a particular language. The first of these two acts is, of course, dependent upon the use of one medium rather than another. The production of utterances in some non-phonic medium — notably when one is writing, rather than speaking - will involve non-phonic acts of one kind or another. As I said earlier, the term 'speech act' should not be interpreted as applying only to the production of spoken utter­ances. The same goes for the term 'locutionary act'.

We have not yet finished with the analysis of locutionary acts; we still have to reckon with the fact that sentences are uttered in particular contexts and that part of the meaning of the resul­tant utterance-inscription derives from the context in which it is produced. This is notably the case in respect of the reference of the referring expressions that it contains; and reference, as we have seen in Part 3, is part of utterance-meaning, not sentence-meaning. The third component of the locutionary act, which includes the assignment of reference and may be described more generally as contextualization, is what Austin calls the rhetic act.

246 Speech acts and illoculionary force

I will make no further use of Austin's terms 'phonic', 'phatic' and 'rhetic'. They are not widely employed in the literature; and I have, in any case, given them a somewhat different inter­pretation from the one that Austin himself did. What is impor­tant is the tripartite analysis itself, which depends, as we have seen, partly on the distinction between language and medium and partly on the distinction between sentences and utterance-inscriptions.

It may be worth adding, in view of the fairly general confusion and misunderstanding that exists in this respect, that the distinc­tion between sentences and utterance-inscriptions is not simply a distinction between types and tokens. This follows from the fact that two utterance-inscriptions produced on different occa­sions can be identified as tokens of the same type without know­ing what sentences have been, uttered. Moreover, as I have emphasized in this section, tokens of the same utterance-inscrip­tion can result from the utterance of different sentences; and, conversely, tokens of different utterance-inscriptions can be pro­duced by uttering one and the same sentence on different occa­sions. This point is crucial for any theory of language-structure that operates with a more or less traditional notion of the sen­tence. Anyone who adopts a traditional view of the sentence (as we are doing in this book) will want to be able to say, for exam­ple, that tokens of

(20) I have,

whether spoken or written, result from the utterance of indefi­nitely many sentences. They will want to say that (20) is an ellip­tical form of any one of a set of sentences, including

'I have done the washing up'

'I have been to California'

T have (got) a personal computer'.

Conversely, they may also want to be able to say (as I will), that a sentence such as

(24) 'I have done the washing up'
can be uttered not only as

8.3 Illacutionary force 247

I have done the washing up,
but also as

I have done it

I have

Me

(with some appropriate prosodic contour, if these utterances are inscribed in the phonic medium). As we shall see in Chapter 9, the analysis of locutionary acts outlined in this section enables us to make statements like these in a way that is both theoreti­cally and empirically satisfying. But, now that I have explained in some detail what is involved in the performance of a locution­ary act, we can look at what is generally regarded as Austin's most original contribution to the study of meaning: his develop­ment of the notion of illocutionary force.

8.3 ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE

Saying is doing. But there are distinguishable senses of the verb 'say'. In one sense, it means, roughly, "utter" or, more techni­cally, "perform a locutionary act". As we have just seen, saying in this sense of the verb involves three different kinds of doing:

(i) the act of producing an inscription; (ii) the act of composing a sentence; (iii) the act of contextualizing that sentence.

To utter a sentence, in all normal communicative contexts, is to perform a complex act in which these three kinds of doing are integrated and have as their product some identifiable and meaningful language-signal: an utterance-inscription. It does not follow, of course, from what has just been said that these three acts are psychologically or physiologically distinct in the actual production of utterances. So far, at this level, relatively little is known by psychologists about the details of utterance. The analysis presented here is intended to be neutral with respect to particular approaches to psycholinguistics and phonetics.

248 Speech acts and illocutionary force

There is yet another sense of 'say' in which, as I have already pointed out, it is possible for two people to say the same thing without performing the same locutionary act and without utter­ing the same sentence. They can say that something is, or is not, the case: that is, they can assert the same proposition. For example, let us suppose that John says (or writes)