Бейсен Ж.Б., Таджибаева А.А.

Региональный социально – инновационный университет

Speech act theory as a central issue of linguopragmatics

Language is an inseparable part of one’s everyday lives. It is the main tool used to transmit messages, ideas, thoughts and opinions and to communicate. It situates people in the society they live in; it is a social affair which creates and further determines their position in all kinds of various social networks and institutions. Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language, but there are all sorts of other activities that can be completed with words. People can make requests, ask questions, give orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies, and so on. Moreover, almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience. According to an American language philosopher J.R. Searle speaking a language is performing speech acts, acts such as making statements, giving commands, asking questions or making promises. Searle states that all linguistic communication involves linguistic (speech) acts. In other words, speech acts are the basic or minimal units of linguistic communication (1976).

The Theory of Speech Acts attracts scientists’ attention with its special structure of communicative situation. Alongside with traditional components such as interlocutor, listener, statement, situation, the theory of speech acts includes aim and result of speech act as well. The theory of speech acts aims to do justice to the fact that even though words (phrases, sentences) encode information, people do more things with words than convey information and that when people do convey information, they often convey more than their words encode. Although the focus of speech act theory has been on utterances, especially those made in conversational and other face-to-face situations, the phrase 'speech act' should be taken as a generic term for any sort of language use, oral or otherwise. Speech acts, whatever the medium of their performance, fall under the broad category of intentional action, with which they share certain general features.

How language represents the world has long been, and still is, a major concern of philosophers of language. Many philosophers, such as Leibniz, Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and Carnap (q.v.), have thought that understanding the structure of language could illuminate the nature of reality; they developed the so-called referential theory of meaning. Treating language as "the projective image” of reality, they considered that there is a number of words, so-called simple symbols meaning of which is reduced to references — to the indicators of object. The sentences including these words can be true or false depending on their compliance or discrepancy to the facts of reality. However, the modern study of speech acts begins with Austin’s (1962) monograph How to Do Things with Words, the published version of his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955. Austin claims that a statement not only describes a situation or states some facts, but also performs a certain kind of action by itself. In this way of thinking, each statement itself should hold either truth or falsehood. For instance, the sentence “You have a wonderful smile” is in one sense either true or false in light of the real world, namely whether the person really has a wonderful smile or not. Yet, Austin points out that this utterance is more than mere description and statement: It does things on its own. The sentence “You have a wonderful smile” can function depending on contexts as praise, telling irony, or even asking for money in a certain situation.

To start with, Austin suspects that philosophers had been neglecting the utterance-as-action aspect, and concentrates on a category of non-descriptive sentences which he labels 'performative utterances', or just 'performative.' Such utterances do not describe or report anything; they cannot be true or false. Performative utterance is a kind of utterance which looks like a statement and grammatically would be classified as a statement, which is not nonsensical and yet is not true or false. When a person makes an utterance of this sort one should say that he is doing something rather than merely saying something. Proposing that uttering a sentence includes actually doing things, Austin makes a distinction between constative and performative: The former is an utterance-as-description view and the latter is an utterance-as-doing view. A constative is simply saying something true or false, depending on their correspondence (or not) with the facts. Instead of the true-false dichotomy, Austin introduces “the doctrine of the Infelicities,” defined as “the doctrine of the things that can be and go wrong on the occasion of such utterances”

There are normally contextual conditions which must be fulfilled before a speech act can be said to have been properly performed. These are usually called happiness conditions or felicity conditions. Some of these are of course conditions on any sort of linguistic communication, such as the fact that speaker and hearer understand one another (usually speak the same language), can hear one another, and so on.

Literature:

1. John R. Searle. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Cambridge University Press, 2 янв. 1969 г.

2. J.L. Austin’s (1962) monograph How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.