Speech Act and Its Types

Conclusion:

In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret.

As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker's intention, the attitude being expressed.

Subtypes of Illocutionary Acts:

Perlocutinary Acts:

Searle (1975)[3] has set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts:

Assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker to believing the expressed proposition, e.g. reciting a creed

Directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice

Commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to doing some future action, e.g. promises and oaths

Expressives = speech acts that express the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks

Declarations = speech acts that change the social sphere in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms or pronouncing someone husband and wife.

Perlocutionary acts: “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring or surprising”.

Illocutionary Acts

In fact, the bartender intends to be performing the perlocutionary act of causing the patrons to believe that the bar is about to close and of getting them to order one last drink. He is performing all these speech acts just by uttering certain words.

Illocutionary acts: “such as informing, ordering, warning,etc., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force.”

In saying this, the bartender is also performing the illocutionary act of informing the patrons of the bar's imminent closing and perhaps the act of urging them to order a last drink.

Locutionary Act:

Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts

Locutionary acts: “roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain ‘meaning´ in the traditional sense.”

Speech acts can be analysed on three levels:

1) a locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance;

2) an illocutionary act: the pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its intended significance as a socially valid verbal action (see below);

3) and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not (Austin 1962)

Or suppose, for example, that a bartender utters the words, 'The bar will be closed in five minutes‘. He is thereby performing the locutionary act of saying that the bar will be closed in five minutes (from the moment he’s speaking).

Origin

Speech Act

A speech act in linguistics and the philosophy of language is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication.

The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and congratulating.

Speech Act and Its Types