Knowledge of meaning and knowledge of facts
4.1 Interpersonal context: illocutionary force and speech acts
The relations between language and context are not limited to those in which a linguistic expression simply names or describes an already existing referent or state of affairs. The assertion of facts about the world is just one of the acts which we can use language to perform: we also ask questions, issue orders, and make requests, to mention only the three most obvious types of other act for which language is used. For much of the history of refl ection on language (principally in philosophy), it was the asserting func- tion that was seen as the most basic and important. Language was seen essentially as a means of describing (asserting facts about) reality, and its importance as an instrument which could perform a whole variety of dif- ferent functions was not fully appreciated.
As it happens, there is good reason to see description or fact-assertion as a particularly basic function of language. As noted by Givón (1984: 248), the fundamental role of assertion in language can be seen as a conse- quence of four large-scale features of human social organization and the types of talk-exchange it engenders:
•
communicative topics are often outside the immediate, perceptually available range;•
much pertinent information is not held in common by the partici- pants in the communicative exchange;•
the rapidity of change in the human environment necessitates periodic updating of the body of shared background knowledge;•
the participants are often strangers.Givón continues (1984: 248):
Under such conditions, even granted that the ultimate purpose of the communicative transaction is indeed to manipulate the other toward some target action, the interlocutors must fi rst – and in fact constantly – create, recreate and repair the body of shared knowledge which is the absolute prerequisite for the ultimate communicative transaction.
Nevertheless, assertion is not the only kind of function which language may be used to perform. We do not just use language to talk about or describe the world; we do things with language in order to manipulate and induce transformations in it. One way to think about how we use language to provoke transformations in the external world is in terms of the idea of force. As we saw in 3.2.1, Frege had already distinguished the force of a linguistic expression from its sense. The conception of force in Frege is still rather sketchy: the only types of force he considers seem to be statements and questions. In a famous series of lectures delivered in the early 1950s, the British philosopher John L. Austin, one of Frege’s translators, extended the Fregean notion of force. Austin’s pupil, John R. Searle, developed these ideas into a comprehensive philosophy of language, the theory of speech acts. We will explore this tradition in the present section.
4.1.1 Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts
In his investigation of the force of linguistic expressions, Austin distin- guished between three types of act present in every utterance, the locu- tionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. He defi ned them as fol- lows:
•
locutionary act: the act of saying something;•
illocutionary act: the act performed in saying something; and•
perlocutionary act: the act performed by saying something.What do these defi nitions mean? The locutionary act – the act of saying something – is the act of expressing the basic, literal meanings of the words chosen. For example, in uttering the words You will get your hands blown off, a speaker performs the locutionary act of stating that the hearer will get their hands blown off. The illocutionary act is the act that the speaker performs in saying something. In many contexts, utterance of the statement You will get your hands blown off is intended, and understood, as an act of warning: the utterance thus has the illocutionary force of a warning. Thanking, congratulating, and advising are all acts which differ in their illocutionary force; in all of them, the speaker does more than describe or assert facts about some situation. As Austin puts it, the speaker of this type of act does not simply say something, instead, (s)he does some- thing (thank, congratulate, or advise) by engaging in a certain convention- alized form of verbal behaviour. Illocutionary acts are also referred to as speech acts. Lastly, the perlocutionary act is the act of producing an effect in the hearer by means of the utterance. Depending on the circum- stances, the perlocutionary act involved in saying You will get your hands blown off might be to dissuade the hearer from playing with a lighter and a stick of dynamite, to frighten the hearer, to encourage them to go on pro- vocatively waving a naked fl ame in front of a bag of fi reworks, etc.
The linguistic expressions which fi gure in illocutionary acts do not simply have the function of describing or stating facts about a situation (this Austin called the constative function). When we say something like You will get your hands blown off, we are not only stating something: we are also performing an action, the action of warning. If it was not obvious that the words You will get your hands blown off were intended to consti- tute a warning, the speaker could explicitly say I’m warning you, you’ll get your hands blown off. In using the verb warn, the speaker makes the force of their utterance as a warning explicit; there is, indeed, no other way to explicitly warn someone other than to use the words ‘I’m warning you’, ‘I warn you that’, or synonymous constructions. Austin called this type of utterance an explicit performative utterance: when I say I warn you that . . . I am not describing or stating the existence of any indepen- dent fact; I am, instead, performing an act (the act of warning) which cannot be explicitly performed in any other way. (By contrast, the basic utterance you will get your hands blown off may well have the illocutionary force of a warning, but it is not an explicit performative; we will call it an implicit performative.)
It would be impossible to provide a full catalogue of all the illocution- ary (or speech) acts which may be performed in English. As well as asserting, questioning and ordering, a very modest list would include promising, thanking, requesting, congratulating, greeting, advising, naming, swear- ing, scolding, apologizing, guaranteeing and warning. All these are par- ticular conventionalized ways of using language which we recognize as associated with a particular repertoire of conditions and responses. In order for a speaker S to request a hearer H to perform an act A, for exam- ple, a particular set of social conditions needs to be fulfi lled. Searle’s sum- mary of these conditions appears in (1):
(1) (i) A must be in the future, not in the past;
(ii) H must be capable of A;
(iii) it must be obvious to S and H that H will not do A anyway, in the normal course of events,
(iv) S must want H to do A, etc. (see Searle 1969: 57–61).
QUESTION Consider the following sentences, and label them as always performative (P), possibly performative (PP), or never performative (NP).
For the fi rst two categories, state whether they are explicitly performa- tive or not:
I resign.
I’m resigning.
A poet is chairman of the Australian Tax Research Foundation.
Bali is not the same place as Mali.
I resigned ten minutes ago.
I’m telling you not to try sour herring.
You’re not allowed to smoke here.
We had a lovely time.
The storeroom is out of bounds.
There’s nothing more I can do to help you.
I don’t accept that argument.
Bingo!
The audience are asked to turn off their mobile phones.
I believe it’s important to be ethical.
I believe in Hinduism.
I guarantee you’re going to love this!
Can I help you?
For an introduction to Relevance Theory, Blakemore (1992) can be recommended.
QUESTION Consider the following sentences. What illocutionary acts could they realize?
I’m glad you’re here. Take your time. I’m allergic to milk. Was that the doorbell?
Don’t worry about putting out the rubbish.
4.1.2 Consequences of the illocutionary perspective
Focusing on the illocutionary aspects of utterances has two important consequences for linguistic theory. The fi rst concerns the centrality of truth and falsity to meaning. We saw in 3.2.1 that Frege had made truth the central notion of his semantic theory. However, considerations of truth and falsity are simply irrelevant for many types of illocutionary act. This is particularly so for performatives, such as the sentences in (2):
(2) I apologize for the mess I’ve made.
I bet you as much as you like that it’ll rain for the party.
I forbid you to touch that diamond.
I promise that I’ll never give you such a fright again.
As Austin points out, it does not make sense to ask whether it is true that
‘I apologize for the mess I’ve made’: the very act of saying the words I apologize constitutes the apology. Instead of being assessed as true or false, the sentences in (2) must conform to certain conditions, just like the con- ditions governing the act of requesting described above. Austin called these conditions felicity conditions.
QUESTION What might the felicity conditions be for each of the speech acts mentioned above? What problems are there in deciding?
The second break with traditional theories of language brought about by a focus on speech acts concerns the question of the basic object of seman- tic analysis. Austin was struck by the fact that it seems impossible to specify any list of criteria which might distinguish expressions which can function as performatives from those which cannot. Any expression, for Austin, can carry any illocutionary force. There is no single way, in any language, of performing a given illocutionary act: the illocutionary force of an utterance is in principle unpredictable from its overt syntactic or lexical form. Speakers often perform speech acts whose communicative purpose (utterance meaning) does not correspond to their obvious sen- tence meaning. For instance, to get someone to close the door, I may well not choose an imperatival construction (close the door, please), but may opt instead for either a question (could I get you to close the door?) or a statement (it’s suddenly got draughty in here). Speech acts like this, whose illocutionary force does not correspond to the most obvious illocutionary force of their sentence type, are known as indirect speech acts.
Because of the frequency of indirect speech acts, any proposed conven- tion linking a given communicative purpose with a given illocutionary form will thus have to reckon with the fact that the same form may also be used to achieve quite different purposes. French, for example, uses a variety of linguistic mechanisms to express commands. As well as the expected imperative form (tais-toi ‘be quiet’), these include verbs in the infi nitive mood (ne pas ouvrir ‘do not open’), and in the indicative (vous dresserez une liste des consonnes sourdes, ‘write a list of voiceless consonants’) – even, in some conventional cases, noun phrases (ta gueule ‘shut up!’, literally ‘your
mouth’). Furthermore, even explicit performative expressions may be used in ways which do not correspond to their conventional meanings. The phrase ‘I guarantee there are no slackers in this company’, for example, has the apparent illocutionary force of a guarantee, but could function as a warning, a threat, a promise, and so on. As Davidson (1979: 73) says, the fact that a single linguistic structure may serve an unlimited number of contex- tual communicative ends points up a fundamental feature of human lan- guage that he calls the autonomy of linguistic meaning:
Once a feature of language has been given conventional expression, it can be used to serve many extra-linguistic ends; symbolic representation necessarily breaks any close tie with extra-linguistic purpose. Applied to the present case, this means that there cannot be a form of speech which, solely by dint of its conventional meaning, can only be used for a given purpose, such as making an assertion or asking a question.
The impossibility of discerning fi xed characteristics of illocutionary force bearing expressions imposes a major reorientation on one’s perspective on meaning. If, given the right context, any expression can be used to cre- ate any contextual effect, then
[t]he unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been sup- posed, the symbol, word or sentence, or even the token of the symbol, word or sentence, but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of the speech act.
(Searle 1969: 16) Under this perspective, the meaningful nature of human communication cannot simply be attributed to the semantic properties of words: meaning- fulness is not a property of language on its own, but of language use as part of an interpersonal context, as part of a network of shared social practices. This insight extends even to the assertive, referential use of language. As noted by Recanati (1987: 128), ‘It is not the sentence “It will rain,” but rather the fact of its being uttered by Jules, that “expresses” or con- veys pragmatically Jules’ belief that it will rain.’ As Austin himself pointed out, the use of language to describe aspects of reality needs itself to be seen as just one other speech act among many – it is, in other words, an activity subject to a set of conventions entirely equivalent to the conventions gov- erning obvious speech acts like promising, thanking or congratulating.
The conventions governing constative utterances (statements) – let us say the statement that p – include the following (Searle 1969: 66; cf. Austin 1962: 136–147):
(3) i. S has evidence for the truth of p
ii. It is not obvious to both S and H that H knows (does not need to be reminded of, etc.) p
iii. S believes p
QUESTION Do all statements conform to these conventions? If not, can you reformulate them to remove the problems?
The utterance of a statement, just like the performance of an illocution- ary act like promising, thus involves both speaker and hearer in a network of commitments and consequences which imply certain things about their current states and beliefs, and commit them to certain future actions. If, for example, I utter the words Rat soup and leather belts were eaten on the Long March, then, in many types of situation, I will be understood to have made a factual statement which I have some evidence or justifi cation for making, and to which I can be expected to be held. The uttering of this statement commits me, as a matter of convention, to certain other propo- sitions, the statement’s entailments and presuppositions (see Chapter 6), such as the proposition that the Long March took place, that leather belts were available, and that there were rats in China at the time. If I subse- quently denied any one of these propositions, or the original statement itself, I could incur sanctions from the other members of the exchange: I could be accused, for example, of inconsistency. These sorts of conditions and commitments can be seen as essentially of the same order as those involved in other types of utterance, such as promises. Just as the act of making a statement suggests I have evidence or justifi cation for what I say, the act of making a promise suggests I have the intention to fulfi l what I say I will do. And just as the statement commits me to assent to its entail- ments and presuppositions, a promise commits me to follow through on the promised act. In both cases, then, the utterance of a linguistic expres- sion can be seen as occupying a place in a structure of past and future actions and mental states, maintained and enforced by social conven- tion.
The use of language is thus not the disembodied exercise of human reason asserting neutral facts about the world. It is a situated, contextual act in a network of social roles and responsibilities. This is always the case, regardless of whether the utterance in question seems essentially constat- ive (factual) or performative. As Austin says (1962: 145–147), the difference between constatives and performatives can be seen principally as one of emphasis. Thus, constative utterances (statements, descriptions) abstract away from the illocutionary aspects of the utterance act in order to focus on its locutionary aspects, and the extent to which the utterance corre- sponds with facts. Performative utterances, contrastingly, focus on the illocutionary aspects, abstracting away from the locutionary dimension.