Pragmatics: Speech Acts, Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary Acts, Grammatical & Communicative Competence

                                                    Pragmatics

                                   Speech Acts

• Using language as a tool to do things: ask for a favour, make a promise, report a piece of news, giving directions, offering a greeting, seeking information, extending an invitation, requesting for help mean speech acts.

• Such speech acts are part of speech events those are conversations, lectures, student-teacher conferences, news broadcasts, marriage ceremonies, and courtroom trials. In addition to births, deaths, fires, robberies, hurricanes, plane crashes, train derailments are also speech events. In contrast, arrests, predictions, denials, promises, accusations, announcements, warnings, threats are examples of speech acts, because actions are performed via language.
• Actions that are carried out through language are called speech acts, and a significant portion of reports in newspapers are reports of speech acts rather than physical acts.

Grammatical and Communicative Competence

• Knowing a language is not simply a matter of knowing how to encode a message and transmit it to someone, who then decodes it in order to understand what it is we intended to say. If using a language is  simply a matter of encoding and decoding messages in other words, of grammatical competence—every sentence would have a fixed interpretation irrespective of its context of use.

• To understand utterances, you must be skilled at “reading between the lines”—understanding utterances in their contexts—and the skills employed in uttering and interpreting sentences shaped by grammatical competence constitute part of your communicative competence.

Sentence & Utterance

Sentence is a structured string of words carrying a certain meaning.

Utterance is a sentence that is said, written, or signed in a particular context by someone with a particular intention, by means of which the utterer intends to create an effect on the addressee.

Speech Act Theory

Speech act theory is a subfield of pragmatics that studies how words are used not only to present information, but also to carry out actions. The speech act theory was introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin in “How to Do Things with Words” and further developed by American philosopher J.R. Searle.

Act vs. Event

An act is doing something to accomplish a purpose, while event is an occurrence something that happens. For example, death, marriage are examples of events. But using language to talk about death and marriage is called speech event. 

Speech Act vs. Speech Event

Speech Act that speaker performs when making an utterance is called speech act.

• Speaking a language is performing speech acts such as making statements, giving commands, asking questions and making promise according to John Searle.
• The acts speakers perform when they make an utterance are called speech acts. John L. Austin (1962) was the first to formulate this idea into a theory known as the “speech act theory”.

Speech Event: An activity in which participants interact via language. 

• Speaking about activities directly governed by rules and norms is termed as speech event.
• For examples, stories, conversations, lectures and formal introductions are the speech events according to Hymes.

Types of Speech Acts

1.  Representatives represent a situation/circumstances like assertions, statements, claims, hypotheses, descriptions, suggestions. Representatives can generally be characterized as true or false.

2. Commissives commit a speaker to a course of action: promises, pledges, threats, vows.

3. Directives are intended to get the addressee to carry out an action: commands, requests, challenges, invitations.

4. Declarations give name to the state of affairs like blessings, hiring and firings, baptisms, arrests, marrying, declaring mistrials.

5. Expressives indicate the speaker’s psychological state or attitude like greetings, apologies, congratulations, condolences, thanksgivings.
6. Verdictives make assessments or judgments: ranking, assessing, such as calling a baseball player “out” combine the characteristics of declarations and representatives, these are sometimes called representational declarations.

Three Acts according to Speech Act Theory

Each utterance consists of three related acts according to speech act theory.

         Locutionary Act: (Utterance/ Linguistic expression)

• The utterance itself.
• Act of producing utterance for meaningful linguistic expression.
• The content of the utterance itself is locution.
• Difficulty in producing sound with the meaningful utterance, because the tongue is tied means failure in producing locutionary act.
• Every utterance is represented by a sentence with a grammatical structure and a linguistic
• meaning; this is called the locution.

Illocutionary Act: (Function/Intended meanings of speaker)

• The intention of the speaker in making the utterance.
• Producing utterance by having some function in mind illocutionary act or communicative force.
• Producing well-formed utterance with some kind of function in mind is illocutionary act e.g. I have just made some coffee.
• The illocutionary act is performed via the communicative force of an utterance.
• Intended meaning of the speaker is illocution/communicative act.
• Speakers have some intention in uttering the locution, and what they intend to accomplish is called the illocution.
•  Illocution is generally analyzed and used interchangeably with the speech acts by some linguists.

                           Perlocutionary (Effects on listener/ Outcome)

• Effect of the act on the hearer; this is called the perlocution, or uptake.
• Creating utterances with functions and intention to have an effect.
• The interpretation of the message by the hearer is Perlocutionary act.
• Mismatches between illocution and perlocution are what we generally describe as misunderstandings.

Examples of three Speech Acts

“Weather is cold outside” is simple locution or statement. But when you say this to your roommate and the door of the room is open, it means to shut the door because of the coldness. This is some kind of request to shut the door, which is indirectly made by the speaker with intention in mind, so it is called illocutionary act/force by the speaker’s intention. However, when the listener shuts the door after hearing such statement, he is doing Perlocutionary act because he simply shuts the door under the effect of the locution.

                                      Conclusion

• A speech act is performing or doing things with words or linguistic expressions like promising, announcing etc.
• Speech events are occurring of events, while using language like the teacher's lecture.
• Using language or words to carry out actions is know as speech act theory, which was given by J.L.Austin.
• According to speech act theory, three important speech acts performing through utterances are locutionary act( Utterance), illocutionary acts(Speaker's intention) and perlocutionary acts(effects of utterance on the listener).

Reference: Language & its use by Edward Finegan