According to his concept of speech acts theory, Austin (1962) in
Allan (1998) believed that instead of having the truth values, all
utterances have felicity conditions. However, the idea of felicity
conditions in connection with speech acts is that the speech acts are only
felicitous a certain circumstances. To perform a speech act successfully, an
addressor must not only utter something which could be taken as the speech act
s/he wishes to perform, but s/he must also make sense the given situation and
context s/he is in when making the speech act; because every kind of speech act
has a set of felicity conditions associated with it.
The followings are four kinds of felicity conditions ―those are
necessary to the success of speech acts performed― stated by Austin (1962) in
Allan (1998):
- A preparatory condition: condition the condition that establish whether or not the circumstances of the speech act and the participants in it are appropriate to its being performed successfully (they include the status or authority of the addressor performing the speech act, situation, etc.)
- An executive condition: the condition that determine whether or not the speech act has been properly executed.
- A sincerity condition: the condition that has similar function to the cooperative maxim of quality (the addressor must really intend to what s/he says)
- A fulfillment condition: the condition that is determined by the perlocutionary effect of the speech act.
