Working Definitions:

behabitives - a kind of performative concerned roughly with reactions to behavior and with
behavior towards others and designed to exhibit attitudes and feelings

not concerned with motive, concerned with (?)

expositives - expositional performatives ; the main body of the utterance has generally or
often the straightforward form of a statement, but there is an explicit performative verb at its
head

verdicitves: can be descriptive merely of a state of mind

Classes:
1. Locution - act is the performance of an utterance, and hence of a speech act.
a. Phonetic Act - the act of making a sound, uttering certain noises
b. Phatic Act - uttering certain words or vocables, noises that belong to a certain
vocabulary
c. Rhetic Act - performing an act with the vocables with a certain more or less
definite sense and reference
2. Illocution - term created by Austin. informing, ordering, warning, undertaking
3. Perlocution - a speech act that produces certain consequential effects upon the
feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience. What we bring about by saying
something ( such as convincing, persuading, deterring, surprising or misleading)

Pheme (unit of language) vs Rheme (unit of speech)



Discussion Questions

1. does a not pure behabitives need emotions.. vs an explicit performative.. pg 83

pg. 88
Pure Explicit Performatives: Not Pure Explicit Performatives:
1) I forecast, predict 1) I foresee, expect, anticipate
2) I endorse, assent to 2) I agree with that opinion
3) I question whether it is so 3) I wonder whether it is so

What differences and variations did you notice between these performatives? Distinguishing
characteristics?

2. p. 97 Can we perform a rhetic act without referring or without naming ? does a rhetic act
need to contain both a phonetic and phatic act?

3. p. 92 When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are not doing something? Certainty
the ways in which we talk about action are liable here, as elsewhere, to be confusing
4. p. 98 Rheme vs. pheme.
A. Discuss the difference between speech and language?
B. Which does IBMs Watson use in Jeopardy?
C. Is one or the other used in intelligence speech?

5. Where does the distinction between illocution and perlocution occur?
For example, if I were to warn someone of something, at what point does my illocution, my
argument or speech, become a perlocution, that is, at what point would I have convinced
them? Since persuasion is so different for different people ( both the convincer and the
person to be convinced )
What factors affect the distinction between perlocution and illocution?
Since it is a spectrum, can it ever be programmed?