The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent the ideas put forward

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1 Language and action before Austin Staan Larsson January 13, Introduction The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent the ideas put forward by Austin on speech actswere new, and to what extent they were already present in earlier work in general linguistics. While it could perhaps be argued that the foundations of speech act theory were laid already in the retorics of antiquity, I have chosen to investigate three imporatant contributions to modern linguistics in the 20th century: Saussure's Cours de linguistique generale [5], Jespersen's Philosophy of Grammar [4] and Bloomeld's Language [3]. 2 Speech act theory The view of language as action in modern linguistics had, it is commonly held, its beginnings in Austin's Speech Act theory, presented posthuously in "How To Do Things With Words" [2]. The idea is that utterances can be seen as a type of actions, having eects on the outside world and being used to achieve the goals of the speaker. Austin started out by distinguishing a special class of utterances which he called performatives which (unlike the constatives) are not true or false. They are not used to describe anything, but rather they are used to do things. Typical examples of performatie utterances are `I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' and `I bet you a sixpence it will rain tomorrow', where the speaker names a ship and makes a bet, respectively. Eventually, Austin is led to the conclusion that all utterances are used to do things - all utterances constitute speech acts. After all, to describe something is also to do something, to perform an action. Austin replaces the performative/constative with taxonomy of speech acts, intended to cover all utterances. However, the canonical taxonomy is perhaps that of Searle [6]: Representatives commit S to the truth of the expressed proposition (assert, state, hypothesize) 1

2 Directives: S attempts to get H to do something (command, request) Commissives commit S to some future course of action (promise, undertake) Expressives express a psychological state in S regarding some state of aairs (thank, deplore, welcome) Declarations directly aect the world (re, declare war, wed) Austin distinguished three kinds of actions that are simultaneously performed when an utterance is made: The locutionary act: The utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference. The locutionary act can, in turn, be divided into three subactions: { The phonetic act: The act of uttering certain noises. { The phatic act: The act of uttering certain words. { The rhetic act: The act of using the uttered words with a certain sense and a certain reference. The illocutionary act: The making of a statement, oer, promise etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it. The perlocutionary act: The bringing about of eects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such eects being special to the circumstances of the utterance. In retrospect, the idea that utterances can change the state of the world (and especially the mental states of other people), seems so obvious that one wonders why it took so long for someone to come up with it. Of course, this is a common phenomena in science - after being exposed to some theory long enough, it's hard to imagine that someone ever thought in a dierent way. Still, surely not all of Austin's ideas were not completely new? 3 Saussure and the language process At the core of Saussure's theory of communication is a model of the speech situation and the chain of communication, or the language process. The speech situation contains two people A and B who are having a conversation. At the start of the process A's brain contains linguistic signs which tie together concepts and sound-images. The language process consists of the following phenomena: 2

3 A concept triggers its corresponding sound-image in the brain (a psychological event) The brain transmits impulses, corresponding to the sound-image, to the speech organs (a physiological event) Soundwaves spread from A's mouth to B's ear (a physical event) The hearing organs transmit impulses to the brain (a physiological event) The impulses trigger the corresponding concept in B's brain (a psychological event) One can perhaps here see an embryo of a theory of language as action, in the sense that language is seen as a process, or act, involving the speaker and hearer. The physiological event on the speaker side seems to be related to Austins phonetic act, but curiously the actual uttering of noises is not included in Saussures model we go straight from physiological impulses from the brain to waves in the air. While Saussure is primarily concerned with studying the sign system itself apart from its use in concrete situations (langue), some aspects of Saussure's linguistics hint at speech act theory. For one thing, Saussure stresses the social character of language, and imagines a science (`semiology') that studies \the life of signs in social interaction". Also, the individual concrete use of language (parole) is said to be related to will and intellegence, which seems to imply a link between language use and intentions which can be found in speech act theory. 4 Jespersens "notional" classication of utterances Jespersen quotes a few examples of taxonomies of utterances, including this one found in Sonnenschein's Grammar (taxonomies by Brugmann and Noreen are also mentioned): statements questions desires (commands, requests, entreaties and wishes) exclamations Jespersen criticizes this and other taxonomies on the grounds that they use two divergent criteria of classication: notional and syntactic. As an example, 3

4 \I want a cigar" and \Will you give me a light, please" are excluded from the category of desire on syntactical grounds, even though notionally they should be classied as desires. The term \notional" seems to corresponds closely to what we today call \intentional". A notional classication of utterances is thus dependent on the intentions of the speaker (the intended speech act) rather than on the form of the utterance (the surface speech act). The distinction between notional and syntactic criteria on utterance classication can perhaps also be seen as related to the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts. Direct speech acts could be said to be utterances where the syntacic and notional criteria yield the same results (e.g. interrogatives a are questions, imperatives are orders), while in the case of indirect speech acts the syntactic and notional criteria diverge. Jespersen then attempts a purely notional classication of utterances, dividing them \into two major classes, according as the speaker does not or does want to exert an inuence on the will of the hearer directly through his utterance." ([4], p.302). A subclassication of the latter class into requests and questions is made. The former class includes ordinary statements and exclamations. Requests include imperatives, verbless expressions (e.g. \Another bottle!"), formal questions (e.g. \Will you pack at once") and formal \statements" (e.g. \You will pack at once"), if the situation and the tone shows them to be equivalent to commands. Requests can also be classied accroding to their strength, from \brutal commands" to \entreaties". Questions are requests for information, and are subdivided into nexus-questions (yes-no questions) and x-questions (wh-questions), according to what their possible answers are. Jespersen also notes some intonational criteria on these two categories. If we add all these subclassications we get a taxonomy of utterances which is rather similar to some later taxonomies of speech acts, e.g. that of Searle, and the recently proposed DAMSL coding schema for speech acts [1]. 4

5 S does not want to inuence H's will { Statements { Exclamations Swants to inuence H's will { Requests { Questions Nexus-questions X-questions A rough impression of the relation between this schema and some more recent ones can be seen in the table below. For the HCRC anddamsl schemas, only the Initiating Move and Forward Looking Function levels have been included. Italics indicate a name of a set of categories. Jespersen Searle HCRC DAMSL (1924) (1969) (1995) (1997) Statement Representative Explain Statement - Assert - Reassert - Other S wants to Directive Instruct Inuencing-addresseeinuence H's will future-action - Request - Action-directive - Open-Option - Question Info-request Nexus-question Query-yn X-question Query-w Check Align Comissive Committing-speaker future-action Oer Commit Declaration Explicit-performative Exclamation Exclamation Expressive Jespersens distinction between utterances that serve to inuence the hearer's will and those that do not seems to be the same distinction that serves to distinguish the directives in Searle's taxonomy. 5

6 It should also be noted that it is referred to as a classication of utterances, not speech acts. While the concept of speech acts is in a sense implicit in the idea of a purely notional classication of utterances, Jespersen does not explicitly talk about utterances as actions. Nevertheless, one might perhaps say that Jespersen (without knowing it) produced the rst modern-looking taxonomyofspeech acts. 5 Bloomeld and the use of language In discussing the use of language, Bloomeld distinguishes between `practical events' and `acts of speech' - a term whichisofcoursevery reminiscent of Austin's `speech acts'. However, it turns out that because of his view of linguistics (to be explained below), Bloomeld's term refers to a much more narrow phenomenon than Austin's term. Bloomeld spends some time arguing against what he calls \mentalism", which is the view that man is not only a physical being, but also a mental being, i.e. she has a \soul" or \mind" which does not obey the causal laws of physics, and her behaviour is thus impossible to predict. Instead, he argues for what he calls the \mechanistic" view. According to this view, man is a purely physical being, albeit a very complex one. The behaviour of man, like that of all physical beings, obeys the laws of causality and physics. According to the mechanist view, it is in principle possible to predict the behaviour of a person if only we have a perfect description of her physical state. Bloomeld takes this view to almost absurd lengths, e.g. when discussing an example of Jill seeing an apple (\the light-waves from the red apple struck her eyes"), noticing that she is hungry (\some of her muscles were contracting, and some uids were being secreted, especially in her stomach"), asking Jack to get her an apple (\she makes a noise with her lips, larynx and tounge"), and Jack getting the apple and giving it to Jill. The use of language is illustrated as a sequence of transitions between stimuli (S) and responses (R), where lowercase letters (s and r, respectively) indicate linguistic stimuli and responses): S! r:::::::s! R The use of language is seen primarily as a way of transferring the response to a stimuli from the stimuli-receiver to the response-producer, using a surrogate (linguistic) response to give rise to a surrogate (liguistic) stimuli. In the example above, the practical events of Jill being hungry and seeing an apple are S, the speaker's stimuli. Jack's fetching the apple and giving it to Jill constitute R, the hearer's response. Blomled argues against psychologism in linguistics - the linguist is simply not competent to deal with problems of psychology, and should therefore study 6

7 only the speech signal (r:::::::s in the above diagram), and not e.g. what makes people say certain things in certain situations. An act of speech, according to Bloomeld, consists of three parts: the speech (substitute) reaction of moving the vocal chords etc. and producing sound-waves in the mouth, the soundwaves in the speaker's mouth spreading to the surrounding air, and the soundwaves striking the hearer's ear-drums and aecting the hearers nerves. This seems to correspond to Saussure's model, but without the psychology, and even the physiological level is stripped of the relations to psychological concepts it had in Saussures model. Much as in Saussure's case, these parts (or at least the rst and the second of these) seems to correspond to Austin's phonetic act, i.e. the act of uttering certain noises. Bloomeld thus excludes from his examples the following descriptions that Austin might have ventured about the above example: Jill says to Jack, \get me an apple from the tree behind the fence!": phatic act Jill says to Jack that he should get her an apple from a certain tree (the one behind the fence): rhetic act Jill orders/asks Jack to get her an apple: illocutionary act Jill makes Jack get her an apple: perlocutionary act However, the phatic act can be said to be implicitly accounted for by Bloom- elds fundamental assumption of linguistics: Until a complete mechanistic and scientic world-view is available, we must assume that in every speech community some utterances are alike in form and meaning. This assumption allows us to distinguish words in the uttered noises, i.e. to distinguish the phatic act. For all its relative poverty in the description of acts of speech, Bloomeld's theory does contain the perhaps most basic assumption of Austin's theory: the view of utterances as actions which aect the world (in the example above, by making Jack give the apple to Jill). Bloomeld also states that the ultimate goals of acts of speech are practical, which is of course a consequence of seeing linguistic stimuli and responses as substitutes for practical actions. In this way, the perlocutionary act is actually included in the analysis as R, the hearer's response, but not as a part of the act of speech itself. Bloomeld does not see this response as something to be studied by linguists, and the perlocutionary act has infact received far less attention in liguistics that the illocutionary and locutionary acts. In the sense that the hearer's action (hearing) is included in the act of speech, Blomelds model can perhaps even be said to include the concepts of collective or collaborative acts of speech which is also included in Austins model in the form of (illocutionary) `uptakes', the hearers recognition of the illocutionary act. 7

8 Bloomeld thus holds a mechanistic and behaviouristic view of language, making extensive use of the concepts of stimuli and response. Because of his refusal to speak about acts of speech at the mental (psychological) level, the illocutionary part of the acts of speech escape him. As a consequence, Bloomeld assumes that we cannot foretell the actions (including acts of speech) of others, but some would argue that this is not true for example, answers usually follow questions. Of course, at the phonetic level the predictability is perhaps lower that on the speech-act level, but it's not zero. For example, following an utterance \hi" there is a larger chance that the response will be \hi" than that it will be \is". 6 Conclusion It seems that, while the basic view of linguistic utterances as actions did exist in dierent forms before Austin, neither Saussure nor Bloomeld made the crucial observation that lead to Austin's theory of illocutionary (and perlocutionary) acts, namely that certain utterances (so-called performatives) can, by convention, be used to perform certain conventionalized actions such asnaming a boat, ring someone from a job, apologizing etc. Having made this observation, Austin then extends the analysis to other so-called speech act verbs, such as as inform, answer, ask, promise, etc. While Saussure at least sees language as rooted in the conversational interaction between individuals and distinguishes certain \processes" that occur in this interaction, he doesn't explicitly refer to utterances as actions. Bloomeld does, however, but his mechanistic view of science makes it impossible for him to even talk about what Austin referred to as the illocutionary act. Jespersen's purely notional taxonomy of utterances is clearly a precursor to Austins classication of illocutionary acts, but Jespersen did not talk about utterances as actions. Without making any claims about what sources of inspiration Austin in fact had, perhaps it is possible on an abstract level to see Austin's theory as a mix of Saussure's and Bloomeld's ideas of utterances as actions and Jespersens notional (intentional) classication of utterances. 8

9 References [1] Allen, J. and Core, M. (1997): Draft of DAMSL: Dialog Act Markup in Several Layers. [2] Austin, J. L. (1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [3] Bloomeld, L. (1933) Language. New York: Holt. [4] Jespersen, O. (1924) The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin. [5] Saussure, F. de (1916) Cours de linguistique generale. Paris: Payot. [6] Searle, J. (1969): Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9

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