Unit 2.

SPEECH ACT THEORY

Notes based on John L. Austin (1962)
How To Do Things With Words,
Oxford: Clarendon Press,

and esp.

Stephen C. Levinson (1983)

Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP, ch. 5)

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 Unit 2. Speech Act Theory - Contents

2.0. John Austin’s basic insight: Speech as action

2.1. Constatives vs. performatives. Felicity conditions
2.2. The linguistic characterisation of performatives. Explicit and implicit performatives
2.3. Constatives vs. performatives? A general theory of speech acts
2.4. John Searle’s felicity conditions and the analysis of speech acts. Speech act categories
2.5. The literal force hypothesis and indirect speech acts
2.6. Direct versus indirect speech acts?
2.7. Applications of the theory
2.8. Exercises

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 JOHN AUSTIN’S BASIC INSIGHT: SPEECH AS ACTION

John L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) is a collection of the William James
lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1955. In contrast to the philosophy of language
tradition, which focused on declarative utterances that describe reality and can be assigned a
truth value, this ‘ordinary language philosopher’ saw everyday verbal communication as
primarily involving action rather than description. This insight led to speech act theory.

In order to argue his point that all utterances are about performing some action, in his book
Austin starts out from the assumption that there is a distinction to be made between utterances
that describe reality – constatives – and utterances that perform some action – performatives –
only to conclude that the distinction is not tenable, and that all utterances are in fact
performative.

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 TRUTH CONDITIONS NOT ENOUGH

• John Austin addressed the problem that it is not possible to describe the meaning of all
utterances in terms of truth conditions, as many utterances, especially non-declaratives,
do not describe the world.

Interrogative utterance: Can you help me with this exercise, Tom?

Imperative utterance: Please help me with this exercise.

• Even declarative utterances, which are prototypical for description, sometimes do not
describe the world and so cannot be assessed as true or false.

Declarative utterance: I declare war on teachers that set such difficult exercises.

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 PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES

• More examples of this:

(1)
I bet you six pence it will rain tomorrow.
I hereby christen this ship the HMS Flounder.
I declare war on Zanzibar.
I apologize.
I dub thee Sir Walter
I object
I sentence you to ten years of hard labour.
I bequeath you my Sansovino.
I give my word.
I warn you that trespassers will be prosecuted.

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 PERFORMATIVES, CONSTATIVES AND SPEECH ACTS

• The previous utterances do not describe reality but rather perform an act – betting, christening a
ship, apologising, warning, etc. Because those acts are performed through speech,* Austin called
them speech acts, and the utterances that perform them performative utterances.

• Unlike descriptive utterances – which he called constatives -, performative utterances cannot be

said to be true or false, as they do not have truth conditions, but instead they do have what he
termed ‘felicity conditions’.

• Austin is concerned with the meaning of utterances, but most, if not all,
speech acts can be carried out in the absence of speech too. (see Exe 1)

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 FELICITY CONDITIONS

Felicity conditions, i.e. conditions on the felicitous performance of an act:*

(2)
A: The people involved in the performance of the act must be the appropriate ones,
e.g. your classmate cannot christen a ship unless they’ve been specifically appointed for that
purpose by the relevant authority.
B: a conventionally specified procedure must be followed completely and correctly,
e.g. a priest will not have married a couple unless he has got them to say ‘I will’, among other
things
C: the people involved must have the right intentions and feelings.
e.g. for a felicitous promise to be performed the speaker must mean to carry it out.

* This is a simplified versión of Austin’s felicity conditions. Austin notes that violations of A and B conditions give
rise to misfires -i.e. the intended actions simply fail to come off-, whereas violations of C conditions -abuses- give
rise to actions which are performed, but infelicitously or insincerely.
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 FELICITY CONDITIONS - EXERCISES

QUESTION: Suppose that, as a Spanish citizen, I say (3) to my husband. Will I thereby achieve a divorce?
Why? How about other cultures?
(3) I hereby divorce you.
QUESTION: Suppose a clergyman baptizes the wrong baby, or the right baby with the wrong name?
Would it be a felicitous act of baptizing? Why?

QUESTION: Will the act of marrying be felicitously performed if the bridegroom replies as in (4)? What’s
the conventional reply? What condition in (2) above is not met?:
(4) Curate: Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife…and, forsaking all other, keep thee
only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?
Bridegroom: Yes, sir.

QUESTION: For a bet to take effect, there must be satisfactory uptake, i.e. it must be ratified by the hearer
with You’re on, or similar words. What condition in (2) above corresponds to this?

QUESTION: Suppose you advise someone to do something when you really think it would be
advantageous for you but not for him, or you promise to do something which you have no intention
whatsoever of doing. Which condition in (2) above would you be violating in each case? 8
 PERFORMATIVES LINGUISTICALLY DIFFERENT FROM CONSTATIVES?
EXPLICIT PERFORMATIVES

• Austin noticed that performative utterances come in a typical syntactic frame, the so-called
performative normal form:

1st person present indicative active sentence form: I promise to come back.

BUT not all utterances in this format are performative: I run 5 miles every day.
SOLUTION (?): performative utterances must also contain a so-called performative verb:
promise, order, congratulate, etc.

• Austin called utterances in the performative normal form AND with a performative verb explicit
performatives – they are explicit about what speech act the speaker is performing.

• Another distinguishing feature of performative utterances is that they collocate with the adverb hereby:
I hereby pronounce you man and wife.
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 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT PERFORMATIVES

• BUT there are utterances in the performative normal form AND with a performative verb (i.e.
apparent explicit performatives) which are NOT performative but constative:

A: ‘How do you get your mum to throw all these parties?’

B: I promise to come. (typical performative linguistically, but in fact a constative)

• ALSO, utterances not exhibiting these typical linguistic features can be used to carry out the
same acts, e.g. warning and accusing:

a. I warn you not to get any nearer. (EP – act of warning)

a’. Do not get any nearer. (IP – act of warning)
b. I accuse you of treason. (EP – act of accusing)
b’. You did it. (IP – act of accusing)
b’’. Guilty! (IP – act of accusing)

A’, b’ and b’’ are so-called implicit performatives – none of them is in the performative normal form and b’
and b’’ do not even contain a performative verb.
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 AFTER ALL, THERE IS NO CONSTATIVE / PERFORMATIVE DISTINCTION

• Austin’s conclusion: one cannot isolate a class of performative utterances linguistically, as

(i) utterances exhibiting the performative normal form and a performative verb (EPs) are
sometimes used to describe reality, i.e. as constatives
I promise to come
and
(ii) utterances lacking the linguistic features mentioned (IPs) are used to perform acts.
I’ll come without fail

• In addition, describing reality is itself performing an act.

> all utterances are performative !!!

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 THE PERFORMATIVE HYPOTHESIS

The conclusion that all utterances are performative led to the Performative Hypothesis (PH):
every sentence has a performative verb in its deep structure (DS) even if the verb is not expressed
in the surface structure (SS):*

(220 SS) a. Did we hear from him? (221 DS) a. I ask you, did we hear from him?
b. Sit down! b. I command you to sit down.
c. I’m cold. c. I tell you that I’m cold.
d. I’ll deliver the Metal. d. I promise you that I’ll deliver the Metal.

* Chomsky popularized the notions of deep structure and surface structure in the early 1960s. ‘The deep structure of a
linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences
"Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, Chomsky
in particular, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that
derive from a common (or very similar) deep structure. (…) Since the mid-1990s deep structure no longer features’ in
generative syntax. (Wikipedia entry Deep structure and surface structure) 12
 The PH explained puzzling facts about the use of reflexives. A reflexive generally needs a
coreferential NP in the same clause:

(222) a. I have made a cake for myself. c. Claire has made a cake for herself.
b. *I have made a cake for herself. d. *Claire is such a great friend that I have made a
cake for herself.

The uses of reflexives in (223) could be explained by the DSs posited in (224):

(223) SSs (224) DSs

a. The party is being planned by Karl and myself. < I tell you that the party is being planned by Karl
and myself.
b. People like yourself should never learn to drive. < I tell you that people like yourself should never
learn to drive.
c. Behave yourself! < I command you to behave yourself!
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 The PH would also explain the use of sentence-initial adverbs like frankly and hopefully:
(225) (226)
a. Frankly, this is a terrible movie. < a. I tell you frankly that this is a terrible movie.
b. Hopefully, I won’t snow tomorrow. < b. I tell you hopefully that it won’t snow tomorrow.

PROBLEM FOR THE PH: the surface and underlying variants do not have the same truth conditions:
(227) a. I’m cold. < b. I tell you I’m cold.
(228) a. Frankly, this is a terrible movie. < I tell you frankly that this is a terrible movie.

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 LOCUTIONARY, ILLOCUTIONARY AND PERLOCUTIONARY ACTS

Austin’s unified analysis of utterance meaning holds that all utterances, in addition to meaning what they mean,
perform specific actions or acts (or ‘do things’) through having specific forces. According to Austin, when an
utterance is produced, three acts are carried out simultaneously:
 Locutionary act: the uttering of a sentence involving a series of speech sounds and a grammatical form with a
certain meaning.

 Illocutionary act: the act of performing an action – the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. – in uttering the
sentence. Other examples of illocutions are accusing, apologising, naming, warning. When we generically speak of
‘speech act’ or of the ‘illocutionary force’ of the utterance, we mean this type of act. E.g. when you make a
promise, your utterance has the illocutionary forcé of a promise. The illocutionary act is under the control of the
speaker.

 Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects
being special to the circumstances of utterance. As opposed to illocutions, perlocutions are not fully in control of the
speaker and are often unpredictable.

QUESTION: Try to imagine the acts the speaker of Shoot her! would carry out in a certain context, according to15Austin.
 JOHN SEARLE’S THEORY

John Searle systematised Austin’s

work by analysing individual speech
acts in terms of their felicity
conditions, and that enabled him to
set up types, taxonomies or
classifications of speech acts.
Searle and other speech act
theorists posited that there was a
priviledged connection between
speech act type and sentence form.

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 FELICITY CONDITIONS

Searle characterised speech acts in terms of four felicity conditions:

1 Propositional content condition: the utterance is about a type of event appropriate to the act in
question, e.g. I can only threaten to do some future event.

2 Preparatory condition(s): specific circumstances must obtain in advance for the act not to misfire or
fail to be carried out, e.g. I can only order you to do something if I have authority over you.

3 Sincerity condition: an attitude, intention, belief, feeling of the speaker is required, e.g. the speaker
must be pleased at an event related to the hearer when she congratulates him on it.*

4 Essential condition: this condition captures what the act essentially is/involves. E.g. questions are
attempts by the speaker to get some information from the hearer.

*‘Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret,
a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that
her speech act expresses.’ SEP entry on Speech Acts, at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/#ConSat
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 John Searle’s (1969) analysis of speech acts using his felicity conditions

John Searle (1969) ‘The structure of illocutionary acts’

pp. 154-5

http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Readings/Searle%20-
%20Structure%20of%20Illocutionary%20Acts.pdf

Look up Searle’s characterisation of:

request, assert/state/affirm, question, thank (for), advise, warn greet and congratulate

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 JOHN SEARLE’S (1969) ANALYSIS OF REQUESTS

Conditions REQUESTS

propositional Future act A of H

content

preparatory 1. S believes H can do A

2. It is not obvious that H would do A without being asked

sincerity S wants H to do A
essential Counts as an attempt to get H to do A

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 JOHN SEARLE’S (1969) ANALYSIS OF WARNINGS

Conditions WARNINGS
propositional Future event E
content
preparatory 1. S thinks E will occur and is not in H's interest
2. S thinks it is not obvious to H that E will occur

sincerity S believes E is not in H's best interest

essential Counts as an undertaking that E is not in H's best

interest

Now try promises before moving on…

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 JOHN SEARLE’S (1969) ANALYSIS OF PROMISES

PROMISES

propositional Future act A of S

content

preparatory 1. S believes that S can do A and

2. that doing act A is in H’s best interest

sincerity S intends to do act A

essential S undertakes an obligation to do act A.

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 SEARLE’S FIVE-FOLD CLASSIFICATION OF SPEECH ACT TYPES
The description of the five types and the examples are from Billy Clark (2021: 115)

Based on his detailed analysis of individual speech acts, Searle produced several taxonomies. Here we will use
his well-known five-fold classification, which can be found in John R. Searle (1976) A classification of illocutionary
acts. Language in Society, 5.1: 1-23.

 Representatives commit the speaker to something being the case

The sun has just come out.
 Directives are attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. This includes questions, which are
requests to provide some information
Pass me the salt.
 Commissives commit the speaker to doing something in future
I’ll be there on time.
 Expressives indicate an emotional reaction or a psychological state
Am I pleased to see you!
 Declarations change the world so that the state of affairs the words refer to becomes true
I declare these games open.

See Table by Alba-Juez and Mackenzie, pp. 53-54 22

 LINGUISTIC FORM AND SPEECH ACT TYPE
See also Table 5 in Alba Juez and Mackenzie, p. 48

Speech act type Sentence type Example utterance

Representatives Declarative Tom’s eating grapes.

commit S to the truth of the proposition
expressed
Directives Imperative Sit down!
are attempts by the speaker to get the
hearer to do something Interrogative (for requests for info) Where did she go?
Commissives Declarative + speaker subject and I’ll call you tonight.
commit the speaker to some future future time expressed
course of action
Expressives Declarative + words referring to The beer is disgusting.
express a psychological state of S with feelings
regard to a certain event
Declarations Declarative, in the performative I pronounce you man and wife.
bring about changes in institutional normal form
states of affairs

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 THE LITERAL FORCE HYPOTHESIS AND INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

• Austin and Searle were apparently committed to the idea that illocutionary force is built into
sentence form and so it can be decoded. Hence each utterance performs a speech act purely in
virtue of its sentence form (see previous slide). This is the so-called literal force hypothesis (LFH).

LFH
(i) Explicit performatives have the force named by the performative verb in the matrix clause.
I warn you not to come any closer. > act of warning

(ii) If there is no performative verb, the three major sentence-types in English, namely the
imperative, interrogative and declarative, have the forces traditionally associated with them, namely
ordering (or requesting), questioning and stating respectively (with, of course, the exception of explicit
performatives which happen to be in declarative format).

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 INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

• PROBLEM: many utterances do not perform the act predicted by the LFH.
• RESPONSE BY LFH THEORIST: the act predicted by LFH constitutes the literal force of the
utterance, but sometimes an indirect force or indirect speech act needs to be inferred.

I want you to close the door.

 Direct speech act: asserting / describing
 Indirect speech act: requesting (for action)

Would you mind closing the door?

 Direct speech act: requesting for information
 Indirect speech act: requesting (for action).

• PROBLEM: most usages are indirect.

• PROBLEM: the LFH theorist must explain how the indirect speech act, here requesting, is
recovered by the hearer, since the LFH cannot do it.

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 INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

Look at the utterances below (taken from Birner 2021, original numbering), all of which can be used in making an
indirect offer. By what means does the speaker seem to manage to carry out the indirect act of offering?

(11) a. Do you need a ride to the airport?

b. Would you like me to take you to the airport?
c. I can give you a ride to the airport.

d. I have a car.
e. I’m willing to drive you to the airport.
f. Consider this an offer to drive you to the airport.

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 INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

Searle (1975) notes that we often perform an indirect speech act by questioning or asserting the satisfaction of a
felicity condition. ‘Here are some plausible felicity conditions on an offer to do X’, followed by the utterance that
questions or asserts its satisfaction (repeated from (11)):

(10) a. The hearer needs or wants somebody to do X. (Do you need a ride to the airport?)
b. The hearer would like the speaker to do X. (Would you like me to take you to the airport?)
c. The speaker is able to do X. (I can give you a ride to the airport.)

d. The speaker has the necessary means to do X. (I have a car.)

e. The speaker is willing to do X. (I’m willing to drive you to the airport.)
f. The speaker intends the utterance to be an offer to do X. (Consider this an offer to drive you to the airport.)

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 INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

We use certain linguistic expressions so often in the carrying out of certain acts, like an indirect apology or an
indirect request, that they seem to have become conventionalised, i.e. they are part of the linguistic meaning of that
expression.
• Consider
Can you pass the salt?
versus
Can you speak Turkish?1

• Decide which two speech acts the following utterance may be taken to perform in different situations:

I’m sorry that you missed your plane.2

1 Examples from Clark 2021:124.

2 Example from Birner 2021: 63.

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 DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS?

• PROBLEM: According to Levinson (1983), the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts is
undermined by certain syntactic or at least distributional phenomena that seem sensitive to the
type of act that is carried out, rather than whether the act is carried out directly or indirectly.
Let us go through a few examples.

• The distribution of please: please occurs in both direct and indirect requests, but not in non-requests:

Please shut the door. (request)

Can you please shut the door? (request)

? The sun please rises in the West. (non-request)

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 DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS?

• The distribution of obviously or I believe: obviously and I believe occur in both direct and
indirect assertions, but not in non-assertions:

The square root of a quarter is, obviously / I believe, a half. (assertion)

Let me tell you that, obviously / I believe, the square root of a quarter is a half. (assertion)
? Is, obviously / I believe, the square root of a quarter a half? (non-assertion)

• If clauses mentioning a felicity condition on the illocutionary act being performed can
occur whether the act is performed directly or indirectly, but not if that act is not being
performed:

Pass me the wrench if you can. (request for action)

I want you to pass me the wrench if you can. (request for action)
? I want to know if you have the wrench, if you can. (request for information) 30
 DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS?

• Levinson (1983) concludes that these examples and others like them at least seem to provide
evidence for the systematic pragmatic conditioning of various syntactic, or at least
distributional, processes.

• More generally, the LFH (i) seems to make the wrong predictions about the assignment of force to
sentence form and (ii) needs to provide an account of how and why sentences seem to be able to
bear the syntactic stigmata, or distributional markers, of their indirect forces.

Recommended practice: Hurford, Heasley and Smith (2007) Semantics: A Coursebook. Units 21-25.
https://www.linguistics.pk/semantics-coursebook-hurford-j-r-heasley-b-pdf/
Recommended video: SEM141 Speech Acts – An Overview, by Jürgen Handke, 2012.

It is a basic introduction to the topic. Begin watching at 3’50’’ till the end.

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 APPLICATIONS OF THE THEORY

• The field of conversation analysis focuses on adjacency pairs (pairs of utterances that co-occur with great
frequency):
17) A: Thanks so much. 18) A: I’m so sorry!
B: You’re very welcome. B: # You’re very welcome.
The felicity conditions of thank you are consistent with those of a subsequent you’re welcome, whereas those of I’m
sorry are not. We interact with machines using natural language. Computers are trained to produce and understand
extended dialogue involving adjacency pairs: they are fed human-labelled corpora and then label incoming
discourse themselves.

• Politeness theory provides an answer to why we often perform a speech act indirectly by asserting or
questioning a felicity condition on it.
‘In every interaction, we’re monitoring not just the exchange of information, but also the relationship between the
interlocutors. Before I decide whether to say Gimme a wrench or Could you hand me a wrench, please? I need to
determine what the relationship is between myself and the person I’m talking to – whether one of us is in a position
of power over the other, whether our relationship is friendly or antagonistic, whether we’re friends or colleagues,
and our mutual level of discomfort, ease, or intimacy.’ (Birner 2021: 73)
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 EXERCISES

These exercises are from Jean S. Peccei (1999) Pragmatics. London: Routledge.

1. Decide if you could perform each of the following actions by either speaking or physical gesture:
(a) Congratulate someone.
(b) Call someone’s attention to the television set.
(c) Forbid someone to enter a room.

2. One way of describing what the following utterances do is to say that they describe a state of affairs.
But think of some contexts where each of these assertions does much more than simply describe a
state of affairs:
(a) There’s a spider in your hair.
(b) Someone’s eaten all the ice-cream.
(c) I’ve got a gun.
(d) You’re an idiot.
(e) I need the salt. 33
 EXERCISES

3. Classify each of the following utterances as interrogative, imperative or declarative. Then decide
what the speaker is using the utterance to do.

(a) You can pass the milk. (d) I could use the milk.
(b) Why don’t you pass the milk? (e) Get me the milk.
(c) Have you got the milk? (f) Send the milk down here.

4. Look at the following pairs of utterances. What difference do you notice between the utterances in
each pair?

(1a) I promise to be there. (3a) I warn you, this gun is loaded.

(1b) I’ll be there. (3b) This gun is loaded.
(2a) I admit I was foolish. (4a) I apologize.
(2b) I was foolish (4b) I’m sorry.

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 EXERCISES

5. In each of the groups below only the (a) utterances would be explicit performatives in Austin’s view.
Think about why the (b) and (c) utterances would not be classed as explicit performatives.

(1a) I admit I was wrong.

(1b) I think I was wrong to leave.
(1c) I know I was wrong.
(2a) I apologize to you.
(2b) I amuse you.
(2c) I flatter you.
(3a) We promise to leave.
(3b) He admits he was silly.
(3c) I warned you to stop.

6. Insert the word hereby before the verb in all nine utterances in exercise 5. Does this produce odd
results in some cases? Why? 35
 EXERCISES

7. Decide whether each of the utterances below is performative, and if not, why not.

(a) You congratulate me.

(b) I envy you.
(c) I command you to put out that cigarette.
(d) I warned you not to go.
(e) We convince everyone with our arguments.
(f) Put your toys away!

8. Using the distinction between locution, illocution and perlocution, analyse Steve’s utterance:
Jane: You’ve interrupted me again!
Steve: I was rude.
9. Give as many illocutions as you can for the locutions I’m sorry and This gun is loaded. Describe the
context in which each of these illocutions would apply.
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 EXERCISES

10. Choose a particular illocutionary force (e.g. apology, threat, request) and give at least five different
locutions which could express that force.
11. Give three possible perlocutions for the locution I love coffee.
12. The expressions below refer to ‘things we can do with words’. Which ones focus on the speaker’s
action and which ones on the hearer’s reaction?
(a) offend (b) mock (c) offer condolences
(d) convince (e) argue (f) console
13. Performative utterances can be worded in such a way that they do not require I or we as the subject.
Apply the ‘hereby test’ to each of the following to determine which ones are performative.
(a) I forbid you to spit on the pavement.
(b) Spitting on the pavement is forbidden.
(c) Spitting on the pavement was forbidden.
(d) You are forbidden to spit on the pavement.
(e) Spitting on the pavement is inconsiderate.
(f) You must not spit on the pavement.
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 EXERCISES

14. What makes each of these promises infelicitous? You can use both Austin’s and Searle’s
felicity conditions.

(a) I promise that I’ll punch you in the nose.

(b) I promise that the sun will come up tomorrow.
(c) I promise that I started the dishwasher.
(d) I promise that you’ll make a wonderful dessert.
(e) I promise that I’ll jump over that skyscraper if I pass my exam.

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