Speech Acts

Speech Acts

1. Levels of Meaning

   • sentence meaning
     • lexical ambiguity
     • structural ambiguity
   • speaker meaning
     • utterance meaning
     • communicative intention/force
     • A difference in these two leads to misunderstanding

2. Performatives

   • Logical Positivism
   • John Austin
     • challenges falsification and verification principles
     • We don't just say, we do
     • all utterances are constative and performative
   • The Performative Hypothesis
     • Constatives
     • Performatives
       • Performance verbs
         • deny
         • promise
         • object
         • apologise
         • quit
         • name
         • sentence
         • baptise
         • bet
         • pronounce
       • felicitous/infelicitous
         • appropriateness conditions
           • must have conventional procedure, right situation
             • right participants must be in place
               • procedure must be executed correctly and completely
                 • sincere intentions
       • explicit/implicit
         • explicit= performative verb used

3. Speech Acts

   • Locutionary Act
     • THe act of utterance in context with sensen and reference
   • Illocutionary Act
     • what you're doing through the force of the utterance
       • communicative intention
   • Perlocutionary Act
     • The effect/uptake of the utterance on the audience
       • misumderstanding means this wasn't effective
   • The Bentley Case
     • Bentley hung for murder
     • Let him have it Chris!
       • Give him the gun
       • Shoot him

4. Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

   • grammatical performativity
     • declarative
     • interrogative
     • imperative
     • exclamative
   • direct
     • obvious relation between mood and speech act
   • indirect
     • when the mood and speech act doesn't match