Speech Acts and Events

In saying something, one does not generally intend more than just to communicate or to say the propositional content of the utterance/s produced, but s/he rather intends to carry out some effects (through her/ his utterance) on her/ his interlocutor; that is, s/he performs speech acts. In general, speech acts are the acts of communication (Devitt and Hanley: 2003). To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech acts being performed correspond to the type of attitude being performed. For instance, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the addressee identifies ─in accordance with the addressor’s intention─ the attitude being expressed.

 

Austin in Levinson (1983: 236) states that there are three levels of action beyond the act of the utterance itself. Firstly, the act of saying something; which is called as the “locutionary act”. Locutionary act is defined as the actual of uttering of a sentence with a particular meaning. For instance, the actual uttering of a sentence “Close the door” along with its particular meaning is a locutionary act. In performing a locutionary act, the addressor uses an identifiable expression consisting a sentence or sentence fragment of the language is used, and spoken with identifiable prosody. Illocutionary act is the intention that the addressor has in uttering the sentence. The request or order (the “illocutionary force” of the given sentence above) to close the door that the addressor is making is an illocutionary act. The act is performed by the addressor in referring to a particular locution. Then, the result of someone (the addressee) is actually closing the door a perlocutionary act. That is, it is the act of addressee achieving a particular “perlocutionary effect” of illocutionary force of the utterance produced by the addressor; in a short word, it is the addressee’s behavioral response to the meaning of the sentence or utterance produced by the addressor within a certain context.