Kauffeld, F. J. (2001b). Utterances as speech acts. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of rhetoric: Oxford University Press.
Speech Acts, Utterances as.
Speech acts are primarily or necessarily performed in and by saying something; they include the act of saying something itself and such other acts as promising, advising, accusing, proposing, ordering, convincing, and persuading. When utterances are regarded as speech acts, attention is properly directed both to the act which produces the utterance and to the product of that act.
Historically students of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic have given attention to specific kinds of speech acts. Grammarians and linguists have classified sentences as declaratives, imperatives, and exclamations. Students of dialectic and logic have identified propositions as products of asserting or of commanding. Rhetoricians have traditionally focused on discourse designed to persuade, but in studying the means of persuasion, their attention has been drawn to a variety of other speech acts as well. Major classical rhetorical genre have been identified, in part, by reference to advising, accusing and defending, praising and blaming. These inherited schema lean to varying degrees on speech acts, but they have focused on the products of those acts, i. e., on sentences, assertions, advice, and persuasion, giving comparatively little attention to the speech acts themselves. Nor have the traditional arts of thought and speech attempted a general or systematic inquiry into communicative acts.
Systematic interest in speech acts emerged in the philosophy of language, initiated by the seminal work of J. L. Austin. Putting aside inherited distinctions, Austin’s How to Do Things with Words sets out to elucidate the full communicative act in all its complexity and variety as reflected in the language persons ordinarily use to perform and identify their speech acts. Austin’s work gives greater precision to interests many contemporary philosophers take in the uses of language and language games. Within the larger act of communicating something Austin identifies three component speech acts: the locutionary act--the act of saying something as might be reported in direct or indirect discourse, the illocutionary act as would be performed in saying something—acts of proposing, promising, apologizing, etc., and the perlocutionary act identified primarily in terms of the outcome or consequences of a communicative effort, e. g., persuading and convincing. Of these three classes, the illocutionary act counts as Austin’s great discovery. Although his characterization of the illocutionary act has been subject to major revision, it is the members of this class which come first to mind at the mention of speech acts.
For Austin the illocutionary act is an essentially overt act, necessarily performed by saying something—an act which, if performed in conformity with the pertinent conventions, has the potential to impact the social and moral order. Promising is a good example. To make a promise a speaker must say something semantically equivalent to ‘I will do x’, where x is the act the speaker promises to perform. The promisor necessarily speaks with the essentially overt intention of giving the promisee reason to believe that she will do x, if only because she said so. This intention can be, but need not be, made explicit by use of the prefatory expression ‘I promise that . . .’. By promising to x, the speaker alters the moral order in that she places herself under and obligation to x. In Austin’s view, promising has that capacity because it is constituted by conventions which dictate that when a speaker utters these words with that overt intention, her utterance has the illocutionary force of creating an obligation.
It is on this last point, the idea that illocutionary acts are constituted by conventions, that Austin’s thinking has come in for its most profound revision. Austin’s conception of the illocutionary act grew out of reflection on performative acts, such as marrying, christening, calling someone out in a game, which are constituted by conventional rules There is a convention in some jurisdictions that if the proper parties each say ‘I do’ in the appropriate circumstances and before the appointed agents, the parties are married. Austin thought that acts like promising and advising are similarly conventional. The doctrine that illocutionary acts are constituted by conventional rules has been widely circulated outside the philosophy of language by John Searle’s influential Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Important work by Austin’s colleagues, P. F. Strawson, G. J. Warnoch, and Dennis Stampe, challenges the idea that illocutionary acts on the order of promising and advising are fundamentally conventional. Rather, an important array of illocutionary acts can be seen to be constituted by practical calculations utilizing the resources of seriously saying something. H. P. Grice’s analysis of utterance-meaning has been instrumental in the development of this view. Grice’s analysis provides an outline of what a speaker needs to do in order to seriously say something which she means, and it suggests an account of the basic efficacy of saying things. According to Grice, a speaker manages to say something by producing an utterance, while deliberately and openly making known to her addressee(s) that she wants the addressee(s) to respond in a particular way, e. g., believe what the speaker is saying. These efforts are designed, and in favorable circumstances serve, to provide the addressee(s) with reason to respond as the speaker primarily intends. Rationale for the addressee’s response is generated roughly as follows. By openly manifesting her primary intention to secure a response from the addressee, the speaker manifestly takes responsibility for her primary communicative effort. She thereby generates a presumption of veracity, viz., a presumption that she is sincerely expressing beliefs the truth of which she has made a reasonable effort to ascertain. After all, her addressee can reason, the speaker would not make herself vulnerable to criticism for mendacity, if she were not making a responsible effort to speak truthfully. This pragmatic account of the locutionary act of meaningfully saying something supports, in turn, a general account of how illocutionary acts work. In making a promise, for example, the speaker says that she will come home at seven, thereby generating a presumption that she is making a reasonable effort to speak the truth, but to further reassure her addressee, the promisor strengthens that presumption by openly giving her addressee to believe that she will make this prediction come true, if only because she knows her addressee is counting her. Or in proposing--a rhetorically interesting illocutionary act--a speaker might say, e. g., that she and the addressee should invest in such and such mutual fund, a proposition which her addressee typically would initially be reluctant to consider. So to induce at least tentative consideration from her addressee, the proposer augments the presumption of veracity by openly committing herself, not just to having reasons which support the truth of what she says but also to providing those reasons to her addressee in response to whatever questions and objections the addressee might raise. The proposer thereby generates a presumption that what she has to say may prove to be worth serious consideration. It seems that other illocutionary acts may work similarly to induce specific kinds of responses from addressees by generating special presumptions build on the basic presumption of veracity. Such illocutionary acts are constituted by practical calculations which utilize and augment resources inherent in the primary locutionary act of saying and meaning something.
It seems then that an account of speech acts can be expected to cast considerable light on the efficacy of communicative means and, so, might clarify matters of traditional rhetorical interest. There are, however, some hurdles to be mounted in moving from the account of speech acts as developed the philosophy of language to concepts useful in rhetorical art. Austin’s classification of speech acts is built on grammatical and logical considerations. Except incidentally, it does not reflect concerns traditionally central to rhetorical art. His category of perlocutionary acts, which includes the rhetorically central act of persuading, is identified more as a backdrop for differentiating the illocutionary act than as a category of distinct and significant interest. More importantly, speech acts, as investigated by philosophers and linguistics, are identified on the basis of distinctions drawn in ordinary day-to-day talk; whereas, rhetoric has traditionally focused on discourse in public forums. The latter are products of art; day-to-day conversation is, in a sense, natural. An art of public discourse requires discursive practices which are sustained by the conventions to which audiences have become habituated and which consequently in some measure stand apart from ordinary day-to-day conversation. Nevertheless, since much rhetorical discourse is addressed to lay audiences, whose knowledge of communicative means derives largely from plain conversational practices, our ordinary conceptions of speech acts and an understanding of the basic dynamics of speech acts bear very directly on matters of traditional rhetorical interest.
The most obvious connection between our ordinary understanding of speech acts and the lexicon of rhetorical art is to be found in the development and delineation of rhetorical genre. Some rhetorical genre derive their basic structure directly from corresponding speech acts. When Alexander Hamilton opens the Federalist Papers by proposing the new Constitution to his readers for their careful consideration, he does just what a speaker in ordinary conversation does in proposing something. He openly incurs much the same responsibilities as would be taken on by an ordinary proposer, and although he and his co-authors discharge those duties at an extra-ordinary level of artistic performance, their argumentation has much same force one finds in any competent defense of a proposal. Accusing, advising, and praising are among the speech acts for which corresponding rhetorical genre are readily identifiable. In these and similar kinds of rhetorical discourse, a rhetor establishes an initial communicative relationship with her audience by openly incurring a discursive burden, and by satisfactorily discharging that obligation, she may generate reason for her audience to, e.g., carefully consider her proposal, hold the accused answerable, weigh her advice, honor the recipient of her praise.
The pragmatics of speech acts can also be seen to operate in discourses which do not derive their generic structure from corresponding ordinary illocutionary acts. Dr. Martin Luther King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” falls into the genre of demonstration. It answers to a set of audience expectations which include the following duties: (1) the speaker is to articulate the immediate audience’s commitment to the cause which brings them together, (2) the speaker is to inspire the immediate audience to manifest their commitment to that cause, and (3) she is to fulfill those two tasks in a way which exhibits to a larger, often dispersed, audience of on-lookers the depth of the immediate audience’s commitment to a good and worthy cause. At the outset of his address, after elegantly rehearsing the historical denial of civil rights to Black Americans, King openly takes on the duties incumbent on a speaker addressing a demonstration. To his immediate audience he says, “So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.” This explicit statement of intent commits the speaker to a clear set of generically relevant duties. By openly making that commitment King manifestly exposes himself to criticism should he fail to fulfill those obligations; accordingly he warrants a presumption supporting the solemnity of his address. King’s introductory commitment parallels the structure and function to a non-conventional illocutionary act, though there seems to be no corresponding well established ordinary speech act.
The relationships between presumption and burden of proof in argumentative discourse is a second topic illuminated by the pragmatics of speech acts. At least since Richard Whately’s nineteenth century Elements of Rhetoric, students of argumentation have thought that just as in courts of law a presumption of innocence imposes a burden of proof on parties bringing a charge of criminal wrong-doing, so, too, in other argumentative contexts presumptions can be discerned which impose probative responsibilities on one or the other side of the controversy. This important insight illuminates much argumentative rhetoric, but it has resisted adequate formulation. In speech acts like proposing and accusing, speakers openly taken of burdens of proof and they do so in relationship to corresponding presumption. Careful attention to the dynamics of these speech acts promises to clarify long-standing questions about the genesis of argumentative burdens of proof and about the force of arguments which discharge those burdens.
Understanding the pragmatics of speech acts also casts light on some artistic aspects of the ethos speakers can generate. Traditionally rhetorical art teaches that a speaker’s apparent character, as know from her reputation and as artistically manifest through her discourse, serves as a primary source of rhetorical proof. The pragmatics of speech acts shows one, very important, way in which speakers can make apparent aspects of their character which warrant favorable responses from their audiences. By openly making herself vulnerable to criticism should she, e. g. fail to speak truthfully, slight her audience’s interests and concerns, treat her opponents unfairly, the speaker can exhibit aspects of herself which warrant consideration and acceptance of her utterances.
In short, philosophical study of speech acts directs attention to what speakers do in and by producing utterances, and this attention brings to light practical discursive dynamics of considerable interest to rhetorical art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDIN ENBbu Austin, J. L. How to do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1962.
Grice, H. P. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 62 (1957), 397-388.
Grice, H. P. “Utterer's Meaning and Intention.” Philosophical Review 78 (1969), 147-177.
Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Stampe, Dennis. “Meaning and Truth in the Theory of Speech Acts.” In Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 25-38. New York: Academic Press, 1975.
Strawson, P. F. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts.” Philosophical Review 73 (1964), 439-460.
Warnock, G. J. “Some Types of Performative Utterance.” In Essays on J. L. Austin, 69-90. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Fred J. Kauffeld
Edgewood College