Assignment

Q. Define and describe Speech Acts and Conversational Maxims by giving examples
from ELT classrooms situations.

What is a speech act?
Definition

A speech act is an act that a speaker performs when making an utterance, including the
following:

i. A general act (illocutionary act) that a speaker performs, analyzable as
including
a. the uttering of words (utterance acts)
b. making reference and predicating (propositional acts), and
c. a particular intention in making the utterance (illocutionary force)
ii. An act involved in the illocutionary act, including utterance acts and
propositional acts
iii. The production of a particular effect in the addressee (perlocutionary act)
Speech-act theory, as introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin (How to Do Things
With Words, 1962) and further developed by American philosopher J.R. Searle, considers
the types of acts that utterances can be said to perform:
iv. Locutionary Acts
v. Illocutionary Acts
vi. Perlocutionary Acts

Locutionary Acts:

In speech-act theory, the act of making a meaningful utterance Also known as locution.
The term locutionary act was introduced by British philosopher John L.
Examples and Observations:
vii. "The act of 'saying something' in the full normal sense I call, i.e., dub, the
performance of a locutionary act, and the study of utterances thus far and in
these respects the study of locutions, or of the full units of speech. . . .

"In performing a locutionary act we shall also be performing such an act as:

a. asking or answering a question;
b. giving some information or an assurance or a warning;
c. announcing a verdict or an intention;
d. pronouncing sentence;
e. making an appointment or an appeal or a criticism;
f. making an identification or giving a description;
and the numerous like."

Illocutionary Acts:
In speech-act theory, a speaker's intention in delivering an utterance.
Examples and Observations:

viii. Illocutionary Act and Illocutionary Force
"[A]n illocutionary act refers to the type of function a speaker intends to
accomplish in the course of producing an utterance. It is an act accomplished
in speaking and defined within a system of social conventions. Thus, if John
says to Mary Pass me the glasses, please, he performs the illocutionary act of
requesting or ordering Mary to hand the glasses over to him. The functions or
actions just mentioned are also referred to as the illocutionary force or
illocutionary point of the speech act. The illocutionary force of a speech act is
the effect a speech act is intended to have by a speaker. Indeed, the term
'speech act' in its narrow sense is often taken to refer specifically to
illocutionary act."




ix. Pragmatic Competence
"Achieving pragmatic competence involves the ability to understand the
illocutionary force of an utterance, that is, what a speaker intends by making
it. This is particularly important in cross-cultural encounters since the same
form (e.g. 'When are you leaving?') can vary in its illocutionary force
depending on the context in which it is made (e.g. 'May I have a ride with
you?' or 'Don't you think it is time for you to go?')."


x. What I Really Mean . . .
"When I say 'how are you' to a co-worker, I really mean hello. Although I
know what I mean by 'how are you,' it is possible that the receiver does not
know that I mean hello and actually proceeds to give me a fifteen minute
discourse on his various maladies."
(Perlocutionary Acts


Perlocutionary Acts

In speech-act theory, an action or state of mind brought about by, or as a consequence of,
saying something.
A perlocutionary act is a speech act that produces an effect, intended or not, achieved in
an addressee by a speakers utterance.
Examples and Observations:
xi. "Intuitively, a perlocutionary act is an act performed by saying something,
and not in saying something. Persuading, angering, inciting, comforting and
inspiring are often perlocutionary acts; but they would never begin an answer
to the question 'What did he say?' Perlocutionary acts, in contrast with
locutionary and illocutionary acts, which are governed by conventions, are not
conventional but natural acts (Austin (1955), p. 121). Persuading, angering,
inciting, etc. cause physiological changes in the audience, either in their states
or behavior; conventional acts do not."
(Aloysius Martinich, Communication and Reference. Walter de Gruyter, 1984)



xii. "In the perlocutionary instance, an act is perfomed by saying something. For
example, if someone shouts 'fire' and by that act causes people to exit a
building which they believe to be on fire, they have performed the
perlocutionary act of convincing other people to exit the building. . . . In
another example, if a jury foreperson declares 'guilty' in a courtroom in which
an accused person sits, the illocutionary act of declaring a person guilty of a
crime has been undertaken. The perlocutionary act related to that illocution is
that, in reasonable circumstances, the accused person would be convinced that
they were to be led from the courtroom into a jail cell. Perlocutionary acts are
acts intrinsically related to the illocutionary act which precedes them, but
discrete and able to be differentiated from the illocutionary act."

Definition Example
Locution The actual words uttered. "What time do you call this?"
Illocution The intention behind the words uttered. Wanting an apology/
explanation for someone
being late.
Perlocution The influence of the words on the
listener.
Listener apologises/ explains.


Speech Acts used in different Class room contexts

Like Wells (1985) did in his Bristol study, we focus in this paper on how different
contexts are related to different language use. Wells (1985) acknowledged that
language use is related to the context in which the interaction takes place:
During the course of a normal day, a child engages in many activities, which
involve different fellow-actors and different materials. Some of these activities
are familiar routines, such as getting dressed; others are more or less novel. In
some activities it is the child who is the initiator, in others a parent, and in still
others it may be another child. Each of these dimensions is likely to have an
effect on the language that occurs. (Wells, 1985, p.322).


The classroom is a setting for
institutional talk or talk between an
institutional representative or client
(Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 2005).

It is the teachers choice of language in
the classroom and awareness of its
appropriate use that can establish trust,
rapport, and credibility (David, 2004).
Locutionary act

i. Students are writing a story.
ii. Teacher taught a poem.
iii. The principal awarded the winners.


Illocutionary act:
i. Teacher: Do you think people who pollute should pay heavier fines?
Student: Yes.
Teacher: Why?
Student: Because they are contaminating the Earth.

ii. Child: We got a new puppy yesterday.
Teacher: Wow. I know youve been wanting a pet
for a long time. How did you get the puppy?
Child: Daddy took me to that place, where they
have pets that get lost and they cant find their
owners.
Teacher: Yeah. The pound, they have lots of pets
there. How did you decide which one to get?
Child: There were lots of dogs and cats. Snoopy
was the cutest. And she liked me!
Teacher: I bet she liked you. How did you know?
What did she do?
Child: She kept wagging her tail and running
around her cage. When they let her out, she
climbed in my lap and licked my face

Perlocutionary act:
i. Student 1 to student 2: "I lose my concentration when you ask a question,
and I dont like it. Please dont interrupt me when I am working unless it is
urgent."
ii.








What is a conversational maxim?
Conversational maxims is a notion devised by Paul Grice in 1975. It looks at the relation
between what people say and what they actually mean in a conversation. Grice developed
four "maxims" of conversation, which describe what listeners assume speech will be like.
Definition

A conversational maxim is any of four rules which were proposed by Grice 1975,
stating that a speaker is assumed to make a contribution that

is adequately but not overly informative (quantity maxim)
the speaker does not believe to be false and for which adequate evidence is
had (quality maxim)
is relevant (maxim of relation or relevance), and
is clear, unambiguous, brief, and orderly (maxim of manner).

The Co-operative Principle is the collective name for Paul Grice's four
conversational maxims which enable effective and cooperative conversation and
help as a means of describing and analyzing the way people convey meanings in
real life interactions:
The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can
gives as much information as is needed, and no more.

The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information
that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are
pertinent to the discussion.
The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one
can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and
ambiguity.


As the maxims stand, there may be an overlap, as regards the length of what one
says, between the maxims of quantity and manner; this overlap can be explained
(partially if not entirely) by thinking of the maxim of quantity (artificial though
this approach may be) in terms of units of information. In other words, if the
listener needs, let us say, five units of information from the speaker, but gets less,
or more than the expected number, then the speaker is breaking the maxim of
quantity. However, if the speaker gives the five required units of information, but
is either too curt or long-winded in conveying them to the listener, then the maxim
of manner is broken. The dividing line however, may be rather thin or unclear, and
there are times when we may say that both the maxims of quantity and quality are
broken by the same factors.

Conclusion:
Speech act theory attempts to explain how speakers use language to accomplish
intended actions and how hearers infer intended meaning form what is
said. Although speech act studies are now considered a sub-discipline of cross-
cultural pragmatics, they actually take their origin in the philosophy of language.







o